4.5 Review

Unconventional SUSY and Conventional Physics: A Pedagogical Review

Journal

SYMMETRY-BASEL
Volume 13, Issue 4, Pages -

Publisher

MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/sym13040628

Keywords

supersymmetry; supergravity; Standard Model

Funding

  1. Fondecyt grant [1180368]
  2. MINEDUC-UA project [ANT1755]
  3. Semillero de investigacion project from Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile [SEM18-02]
  4. Chilean Government through the Centers of Excellence Base Financing Program of Conicyt

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Supersymmetry plays a crucial role in the extensions of the Standard Model, with potential to simplify systems while emerging as a contingent symmetry depending on features of the vacuum state.
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 vertical bar 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 vertical bar 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.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.5
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available