New supergravities with central charges and Killing spinors in 2+1 dimensions

TL;DR

This paper introduces new (p,q)-extended Poincaré supergravity theories in 2+1 dimensions as Chern-Simons theories, highlighting their limits from AdS supergravity, off-shell formulations, and the existence of conical spacetimes with Killing spinors.

Contribution

It constructs novel supergravity theories with central and automorphism charges, providing off-shell formulations and demonstrating the existence of conical spacetimes with Killing spinors in (2,0) models.

Findings

New (p,q)-extended supergravity theories constructed

Theories are limits of AdS supergravity models

Existence of conical spacetimes with Killing spinors in (2,0) models

Abstract

We construct a new class of $(p,q)$-extended Poincar\'e supergravity theories in 2+1 dimensions as Chern-Simons theories of supersymmetry algebras with both central and automorphism charges. The new theories have the advantage that they are limits of corresponding $(p,q)$ adS supergravity theories and, for not too large a value of $N=p+q$, that they have a natural formulation in terms of off-shell superfields, in which context the distinction between theories having the same value of $N$ but different $(p,q)$ arises because of inequivalent conformal compensator superfields. We also show that, unlike previously constructed N-extended Poincar\'e supergravity theories, the new (2,0) theory admits conical spacetimes with Killing spinors. Many of our results on (2,0) Poincar\'e supergravity continue to apply in the presence of coupling to N=2 supersymmetric sigma-model matter.