Central charges and Lorentz and internal symmetries in massive supersymmetric quantum field theory

Abstract

The properties of central charges in the framework of the massive supersymmetric quantum field theory related to internal symmetries, Lorentz covariance and locality of the fields are investigated. It is shown that in the presence of z central charges the largest semisimple part of the internal symmetry algebra is a direct sum of z compact symplectic group algebras and possibly an additional term representing the unimodular unitary group algebra. Next it is shown that 4 j ⩾ N + K, where j is the highest spin value of the underlying fields, N is the number of spinorial charges and K the number of these spinorial charges which are not linked to other spinorial charges by a central charge. It is further demonstrated that, in general, the central charge can not be redefined in such a way that it is at the same time real and preserves the locality principle. The discussion of the obtained results concludes the paper.