Supersymmetry and Supergravity: Revised Edition

Abstract

The first edition of this book appeared in 1983 and was based on a series of lectures given at Princeton in 1983 by Julius Wess. Since the appearance of the first edition much work has been done on the development of phenomenological models of particle behavior based on the supergravity multiplet. Some experimental searches have been carried out and others are planned for the future. For this reason the second edition of the book goes substantially beyond the first. Six new chapters have been added for a total of twenty-six and five new appendices for a total of seven. The new chapters and appendices are primarily aimed at deriving the most general supersymmetric gauge invariant theory of chiral fields interacting with supergravity and expressing it in component form. The book is divided into three sections. After a brief introduction, the first part of the book deals with a description of N=1 supersymmetric non-abelian rigid gauge theory of chiral fields. The second part of the book develops a local supersymmetric theory which is supergravity. The final part describes the coupling of supersymmetric chiral fields to supergravity in a gauge invariant way. The book may be recommended as a pedagogical introduction tomore » the theory of N=1 supergravity. Together with the appendices is is completely self-contained, both in notation and in the concepts used, requiring only some knowledge of field theory as a background.« less