English

All Superparticles are BPS

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-18 v2

Abstract

The generic action for an N-extended superparticle in D-dimensional Minkowski spacetime is shown to have "hidden" supersymmetries (related by "dualities" to the manifest supersymmetries) such that the full supersymmetry algebra is BPS-saturated; the exceptions (which include, trivially, the massless case) are those for which the manifest supersymmetry algebra is already BPS-saturated. Moreover, it is shown that any "non-BPS" superparticle action is a gauge-fixed version of the "BPS" superparticle action for which all supersymmetries are manifest. An example is the N=1 massive D=10 superparticle, which actually has N=2 supersymmetry and is equivalent to the action for a D0-brane of IIA superstring theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1401.5116,
  title  = {All Superparticles are BPS},
  author = {Luca Mezincescu and Alasdair J. Routh and Paul K. Townsend},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.5116},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

13 pages. Minor improvements plus new reference in v2

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:50:31.962Z