Physics Letters B 785 (2018) 247–253
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
On the Maxwell supergravity and flat limit in 2 + 1dimensions
Patrick Concha
a,∗
, Diego M. Peñafiel
a
, Evelyn Rodríguez
b
a
Instituto de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Casilla 4059, Valparaiso, Chile
b
Departamento de Ciencias, Facultad de Artes Liberales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar, Chile
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
4 July 2018
Received
in revised form 23 August 2018
Accepted
27 August 2018
Available
online 30 August 2018
Editor: M.
Cveti
ˇ
c
The construction of the three-dimensional Chern–Simons supergravity theory invariant under the
minimal Maxwell superalgebra is presented. We obtain a supergravity action without cosmological
constant term characterized by three coupling constants. We also show that the Maxwell supergravity
presented here appears as a vanishing cosmological constant limit of a minimal AdS–Lorentz supergravity.
The flat limit is applied at the level of the superalgebra, Chern–Simons action, supersymmetry
transformation laws and field equations.
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
The three-dimensional (super)gravity is considered as an in-
teresting
toy model for approaching richer (super)gravity models,
which in general are non-trivial. Furthermore, the three-dimen-
sional
theory shares many interesting properties with higher-
dimensional
theories such as black hole solutions [1]. Remarkably,
supergravity theory in three spacetime dimensions [2,3]can be ex-
pressed
as a gauge theory using the Chern–Simons (CS) formalism
for the AdS [4]or Poincaré supergroup [5]. In the last decades, di-
verse
three-dimensional supergravity models have been studied in
[6–24]. In particular, there has been a growing interest to extend
AdS and Poincaré supergravity theories to other symmetries.
The
Maxwell symmetry has become an interesting alternative
for generalizing Einstein gravity. The Maxwell algebra has been in-
troduced
to describe a particle moving in a four-dimensional back-
ground
in the presence of a constant electromagnetic field [25–27].
Further applications of the Maxwell group have been developed in
[28–30]. The Maxwell symmetry and its generalizations have been
useful to recover General Relativity (GR) as a particular limit us-
ing
the CS and Born–Infeld (BI) gravity formalism [31–35]. In four
dimensions, Maxwell gravity models have been successfully con-
structed
in [36–38]. More recently, there has been a growing inter-
est
in studying the three-dimensional CS gravity theory invariant
under the Maxwell group [39–43]. This theory, as the Poincaré one,
is asymptotically flat and does not contain a cosmological constant
term. Interestingly, anovel asymptotic structure appears for the
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: patrick.concha@pucv.cl (P. Concha), diego.molina.p@pucv.cl
(D.M. Peñafiel),
evelyn.rodriguez@edu.uai.cl (E. Rodríguez).
three-dimensional Maxwell CS gravity [43]. Such asymptotic sym-
metry
corresponds to a deformed bms
3
algebra and has been first
introduced in [44]by using the semigroup expansion procedure
[45]. Furthermore, it has been shown that the vacuum energy and
angular momentum are influenced by the presence of the gravita-
tional
Maxwell field [43].
The
Maxwell algebra also appears as an Inönü–Wigner (IW)
contraction [46,47]of an enlarged algebra known as AdS–Lorentz
algebra. The AdS–Lorentz algebra, also known as the semisim-
ple
extended Poincaré algebra, was introduced in [48,49] and has
been studied in the context of gravity in diverse dimensions [40,
50,51].
Such symmetry can be written as the semidirect sum
s0(d − 1, 2) ⊕ s0(d − 1, 1) which motivates the name of AdS–
Lorentz.
At
the supersymmetric level, a minimal extension of the
Maxwell algebra appears to describe the geometry of a four-
dimensional
superspace in presence of a constant abelian super-
symmetric
gauge field background [52]. Subsequently in [53,54],
the Maxwell superalgebra has been used to construct a pure su-
pergravity
action in four dimensions using geometric methods.
Further applications of the Maxwell superalgebra in the context
of supergravity can be found in [55,56]. Such superalgebra has the
particularity of having more than one spinor charge and has been
obtained in [57,58]through algebraic expansion mechanisms [45,
59].
More recently, aCS gravity action for a generalized Maxwell
superalgebra has been presented in [60,61]in three spacetime di-
mensions.
Although the CS supergravity theory is appropriately
constructed, it requires to consider a large amount of gauge fields
whose origin is due to the methodology. To our knowledge, the
construction of a CS supergravity action for the minimal Maxwell
superalgebra in absence of extra fields has not been presented yet.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.08.050
0370-2693/
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.