From Diophantus to supergravity and massless higher spin multiplets

Abstract

Abstract We present a new method of deriving the off-shell spectrum of supergravity and massless 4D, $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 1 higher spin multiplets without the need of an action and based on a set of natural requirements: (a.) existence of an underlying superspace description, (b.) an economical description of free, massless, higher spins and (c.) equal numbers of bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom. We prove that for any theory that respects the above, the fermionic auxiliary components come in pairs and are gauge invariant and there are two types of bosonic auxiliary components. Type (1) are pairs of a (2, 0)-tensor with real or imaginary (1, 1)-tensor with non-trivial gauge transformations. Type (2) are singlets and gauge invariant. The outcome is a set of Diophantine equations, the solutions of which determine the off-shell spectrum of supergravity and massless higher spin multiplets. This approach provides (i ) a classification of the irreducible, supersymmetric, representations of arbitrary spin and (ii ) a very clean and intuitive explanation to why some of these theories have more than one formulations (e.g. the supergravity multiplet) and others do not.