nLab superspace

Contents

This entry is about the concept in supergeometry. For the concept in gravity/cosmology see at Wheeler superspace.

Context

Super-Geometry

Contents

Idea

Physicists often refer to spaces in supergeometry, such as supermanifolds or super schemes, as superspaces. Hence a superspace can be an affine superspace (the affine counterpart of the super vector space over real or complex numbers), superscheme, supermanifold, etc.

Mostly however “superspace” is used for superspacetimes, and here mostly for super Minkowski spacetimes.

References

The concept of superspace in physics (together with that of superfields) is due to

(which considered superspace of dimension d=4d = 4 with number of supersymmetries N=2N = 2, hence the supermanifold 4|4+4\mathbb{R}^{4\vert \mathbf{4}+ \mathbf{4}}, or rather the super Minkowski spacetime 3,1|4+4\mathbb{R}^{3,1\vert \mathbf{4}+ \mathbf{4}})

Monographs:

The formulation of supergravity on super spacetime supermanifolds:

For more on this see the:

See also:

Further review:

Discussion of superspace within philosophy of physics:

  • Tushar Menon, Taking up superspace – the spacetime structure of supersymmetric field theory (philsci:14682, pdf,)

Last revised on March 17, 2024 at 16:41:02. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.