4D N=2 supergravity and projective superspace

This paper presents a projective superspace formulation for 4D N = 2 matter-coupled supergravity. We first describe a variant superspace realization for the N = 2 Weyl multiplet. It differs from that proposed by Howe in 1982 by the choice of the structure group SO(3, 1) x SU(2) versus SO(3, 1) x U( 2)), which implies that the super-Weyl transformations are generated by a covariantly chiral parameter instead of a real unconstrained one. We introduce various off-shell supermultiplets which are curved superspace analogues of the superconformal projective multiplets in global supersymmetry and which describe matter fields coupled to supergravity. A manifestly locally supersymmetric and super-Weyl invariant action principle is given. Off-shell locally supersymmetric nonlinear sigma models are presented in this new superspace.