A twistor-like D=10 superparticle action with manifest N=8 world-line supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new twistor-like formulation of the D=10 superparticle that maintains manifest supersymmetry and Lorentz invariance, involving a finite set of auxiliary fields and a novel coupling mechanism to super-Maxwell backgrounds.

Contribution

It presents a novel superparticle action with manifest N=8 world-line supersymmetry and a geometric construction involving the sphere S^8, explaining the origin of fermionic kappa symmetry.

Findings

The action is invariant under target-space super-Poincaré and world-line superconformal groups.

The formulation involves auxiliary fields in trilinear combinations.

A new mechanism for coupling to super-Maxwell backgrounds is proposed.

Abstract

We propose a new formulation of the $D=10$ Brink-Schwarz superparticle which is manifestly invariant under both the target-space super-Poincar\'e group and the world-line local $N=8$ superconformal group. This twistor-like construction naturally involves the sphere $S^8$ as a coset space of the $D=10$ Lorentz group. The action contains only a finite set of auxiliary fields, but they appear in unusual trilinear combinations. The origin of the on-shell $D=10$ fermionic $\kappa$ symmetry of the standard Brink-Schwarz formulation is explained. The coupling to a $D=10$ super-Maxwell background requires a new mechanism, in which the electric charge appears only on shell as an integration constant.