English

Worldline CPT and massless supermultiplets

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-10-12 v3

Abstract

The action for a massless particle in 4D Minkowski space has a worldline time-reversing symmetry corresponding to CPT invariance of the quantum theory. The analogous symmetry of the N-extended superparticle is shown to be anomalous when N is odd, in the supertwistor formalism this is because a CPT-violating worldline-Chern-Simons term is needed to preserve the chiral U(1) gauge invariance. This accords with the fact that no massless N=1 super-Poincar\'e irrep is CPT-self-conjugate. There is a CPT self-conjugate supermultiplet when N is even, but it has 2N+12^{N+1} states when N/2 is odd (e.g. the N=2 hypermultiplet) in contrast to just 2N2^N when N/2 is even (e.g. the N=4 Maxwell supermultiplet). This is shown to follow from a Kramers degeneracy of the superparticle state space when N/2 is odd.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.00526,
  title  = {Worldline CPT and massless supermultiplets},
  author = {Alex S. Arvanitakis and Luca Mezincescu and Paul K. Townsend},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.00526},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

23 pp. Typos corrected, references added and Appendix expanded in v.2. Additional sign choices, simplified equations and clarifications included in v.3

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:41:33.966Z