Supersymmetric Solutions in Four-Dimensional Off-Shell Curvature-Squared Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper explores off-shell four-dimensional N=1 supergravity with higher-derivative invariants, finding various solutions including supersymmetric domain walls, Lifshitz geometries, and gyratons, with some solutions requiring analytic continuation.

Contribution

It introduces new supersymmetric solutions in off-shell supergravity with curvature-squared invariants, including cases with imaginary auxiliary fields and pseudo-supersymmetry concepts.

Findings

Solutions include domain walls, Lifshitz geometries, and gyratons.

Some solutions are supersymmetric with parameter choices.

Imaginary auxiliary fields can be reinterpreted via analytic continuation.

Abstract

Off-shell formulations of supergravities allow one to add closed-form higher-derivative super-invariants that are separately supersymmetric to the usual lower-derivative actions. In this paper we study four-dimensional off-shell N=1 supergravity where additional super-invariants associated with the square of the Weyl tensor and the square of the Ricci scalar are included. We obtain a variety of solutions where the metric describes domain walls, Lifshitz geometries, and also solutions of a kind known as gyratons. We find that in some cases the solutions can be supersymmetric for appropriate choices of the parameters. In some solutions the auxiliary fields may be imaginary. One may reinterpret these as real solutions in an analytically-continued theory. Since the supersymmetry transformation rules now require the gravitino to be complex, the analytically-continued theory has a "fake supersymmetry" rather than a genuine supersymmetry. Nevertheless, the concept of pseudo-supersymmetric solutions is a useful one, since the Killing spinor equations provide first-order equations for the bosonic fields.