Homehep-tharXiv:2605.29990

Perturbative Nicolai-Map Diagrammatics: Application to Poincar\'{e} Supergravity

hep-th2026-05v1license

Abstract

We develop a perturbative, diagrammatic framework for constructing Nicolai maps and apply it to four-dimensional N=1\mathcal{N}=1 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 κ\kappa and the loop-counting parameter \hbar, 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 κ2\kappa^{2}, the resulting constraints are found to be independent of the detailed bosonic input and hierarchical, order-κ2\kappa^{2} consistency further restricting the order-κ\kappa 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 N=1\mathcal{N}=1 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}
}