Unconventional SUSY and Conventional Physics: A Pedagogical Review

Abstract

In supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, the observed particles come in fermion–boson pairs necessary for the realization of supersymmetry (SUSY). In spite of the expected abundance of super-partners for all the known particles, not a single supersymmetric pair has been reported to date. Although a hypothetical SUSY breaking mechanism, operating at high energy inaccessible to current experiments cannot be ruled out, this reduces SUSY’s predictive power and it is unclear whether SUSY, in its standard form, can help reducing the remaining puzzles of the standard model (SM). Here we argue that SUSY can be realized in a different way, connecting spacetime and internal bosonic symmetries, combining bosonic gauge fields and fermionic matter particles in a single gauge field, a Lie superalgebra-valued connection. In this unconventional representation, states do not come in SUSY pairs, avoiding the doubling of particles and fields and SUSY is not a fully off-shell invariance of the action. The resulting systems are remarkably simple, closely resembling a standard quantum field theory and SUSY still emerges as a contingent symmetry that depends on the features of the vacuum/ground state. We illustrate the general construction with two examples: (i) A 2 + 1 dimensional system based on the osp(2,2|2) superalgebra, including Lorentz and u(1) generators that describe graphene; (ii) a supersymmetric extension of 3 + 1 conformal gravity with an SU(2,2|2) connection that describes a gauge theory with an emergent chiral symmetry breaking, coupled to gravity. The extensions to higher odd and even dimensions, as well as the extensions to accommodate more general internal symmetries are also outlined.

Spinor solutions of a Chern-Simons model for the superconformal algebra

“…On the one hand, replacing (24) in (20), taking the covariant derivative and using the Bianchi identity (25) we get…”

“…The composite field e a γ a ψ are fermonic one-forms and they are killed by the spin 3/2 projector. Such embedding of spin 1/2 fields in the adjoint representation of the superalgebra is the so called 'unconventional supersymmetry' [20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. In 2+1 dimensions the action is based on the Chern-Simons term and in [27] the authors showed that the only propagating local degrees of freedom are the fermions.…”

$$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 2 extended MacDowell-Mansouri supergravity

“…Extensions of these ideas to four dimensions can be found in [23,32]. In unconventional supersymmetry (for a review see [33]) a spin-1/2 field is introduced directly in the supersymmetry gauge connection, not as a fundamental gravitino field but combined with the vielbein in the form,…”

$\mathcal{N}=2$ Extended MacDowell-Mansouri Supergravity

“…In unconventional supersymmetry (for a review see [26]) a spin-1/2 field is introduced directly in the supersymmetry gauge connection, not as a fundamental gravitino field but combined with the vielbein in the form,…”