New Massive Supergravity and Auxiliary Fields

TL;DR

This paper develops a supersymmetric formulation of linearized New Massive Gravity using auxiliary fields, avoiding higher derivatives initially, and discusses extending these results non-linearly.

Contribution

It introduces a novel off-shell supersymmetric formulation of massive gravity with auxiliary fields, eliminating the need for higher derivatives at the outset.

Findings

Auxiliary fields enable a supersymmetric description without higher derivatives

Elimination of auxiliary fields yields higher-derivative terms in the metric and gravitino

Discussion of non-linear extension of the supersymmetric massive gravity

Abstract

We construct a supersymmetric formulation of linearized New Massive Gravity without introducing higher derivatives. Instead, we introduce supersymmetrically a set of bosonic and fermionic auxiliary fields which, upon elimination by their equations of motion, introduce fourth-order derivative terms for the metric and third-order derivative terms for the gravitino. Our construction requires an off-shell formulation of the three-dimensional supersymmetric massive Fierz-Pauli theory. We discuss the non-linear extension of our results.