The symplectic origin of conformal and Minkowski superspaces

Abstract

Supermanifolds provide a very natural ground to understand and handle supersymmetry from a geometric point of view; supersymmetry in d = 3, 4, 6, and 10 dimensions is also deeply related to the normed division algebras. In this paper we want to show the link between the conformal group and certain types of symplectic transformations over division algebras. Inspired by this observation we then propose a new realization of the real form of the 4 dimensional conformal and Minkowski superspaces we obtain, respectively, as a Lagrangian supermanifold over the twistor superspace ℂ4|1 and a big cell inside it. The beauty of this approach is that it naturally generalizes to the 6 dimensional case (and possibly also to the 10 dimensional one) thus providing an elegant and uniform characterization of the conformal superspaces.