Perturbative Nicolai-Map Diagrammatics: Application to Poincar\'{e} Supergravity
Abstract
We develop a perturbative, diagrammatic framework for constructing Nicolai maps and apply it to four-dimensional Poincar\'e supergravity expanded around flat Minkowski space. It provides an alternative to the coupling-flow-operator construction, which faces several obstructions when extended to local supersymmetry. Expanding the bosonic effective action and the Nicolai map jointly in the gravitational coupling and the loop-counting parameter , we derive the Nicolai-map defining conditions, i.e. the free-action and determinant-matching conditions, order by order. The diagrammatics enumerates all admissible local terms in the Nicolai-map ansatz from the effective-action diagrams and reduces the construction to a finite system of nonlinear polynomial equations. Carried through order , the resulting constraints are found to be independent of the detailed bosonic input and hierarchical, order- consistency further restricting the order- data. A consistent Nicolai-map construction for the Einstein--Hilbert graviton sector is found to require the Rarita--Schwinger gravitino already at this order: Einstein gravity admits a Nicolai map only through its supersymmetric completion, Poincar\'e supergravity, supporting Nicolai's characterization of supersymmetry.
Comments: 75 pages, 8 figures
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.29990,
title = {Perturbative Nicolai-Map Diagrammatics: Application to Poincar\'{e} Supergravity},
author = {Ji-Seong Chae and Hun Jang and Junhyeok Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29990},
year = {2026}
}