Noncovariant Gauges in Simple Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates noncovariant axial gauges in simple supergravity at one loop, analyzing boundary conditions and ghost modes, and demonstrates the classical admissibility of such gauges.

Contribution

It extends previous work by studying axial gauge in supergravity with boundary conditions and proves the classical validity of noncovariant gauges.

Findings

Ghost modes obey nonlocal spectral boundary conditions.

Ghost contributions to one-loop divergence vanish.

Noncovariant gauges are classically admissible.

Abstract

A gauge-averaging functional of the axial type is studied for simple supergravity at one loop about flat Euclidean four-space bounded by a three-sphere, or two concentric three-spheres. This is a generalization of recent work on the axial gauge in quantum supergravity on manifolds with boundary. Ghost modes obey nonlocal boundary conditions of the spectral type, in that half of them obey Dirichlet or Neumann conditions at the boundary. In both cases, they give a vanishing contribution to the one-loop divergence. The admissibility of noncovariant gauges at the classical level is also proved.