Eur. Phys. J. C (2008) 54: 339-343
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-008-0535-4

Special Article - Scientific Note

The descent of off-shell supersymmetry to the mass shell

short review

¹ Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
² Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia
³ Department of Physics, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

^* e-mail: krotov@inr.ac.ru

Received: 19 July 2007
Revised: 19 December 2007
Published online: 30 January 2008

Abstract

It is shown that classical actions for some “physically interesting” quantum field theories can be obtained as effective actions from the single “fundamental” theory of the Chern–Simons form. The physical degrees of freedom are encoded in the space of cohomologies of a certain differential operator. This observation suggests a different perspective on some of the supersymmetric properties of these effective theories. Namely, it is possible to construct a superfield formalism which allows to find off-shell SUSY actions for the on-shell supersymmetric theories, where conventional superfield formalism does not work. This formalism contains even auxiliary variables λ^α in addition to conventional odd variables θ^α. This idea is similar to the Pure Spinor construction. This paper is a short review of papers [11, 12]. Original results discussed below were obtained in collaboration with V. Alexandrov, A. Gorodentsev, A. Losev and V. Lysov.