Off-Shell Supersymmetry and Filtered Clifford Supermodules

An off-shell representation of supersymmetry is a representation of the super Poincaré algebra on a dynamically unconstrained space of fields. We describe such representations formally, in terms of the fields and their spacetime derivatives, and we interpret the physical concept of engineering dimension as an integral grading. We prove that formal graded off-shell representations of one-dimensional N-extended supersymmetry, i.e., the super Poincaré algebra \(\mathfrak {p}^{1|N}\), correspond to filtered Clifford supermodules over Cl(N). We also prove that formal graded off-shell representations of two-dimensional (p,q)-supersymmetry, i.e., the super Poincaré algebra \(\mathfrak {p}^{1,1|p,q}\), correspond to bifiltered Clifford supermodules over Cl(p + q). Our primary tools are Rees superalgebras and Rees supermodules, the formal deformations of filtered superalgebras and supermodules, which give a one-to-one correspondence between filtered spaces and graded spaces with even degree-shifting injections. This generalizes the machinery used by Gerstenhaber to prove that every filtered algebra is a deformation of its associated graded algebra. Our treatment extends the notion of Rees algebras and modules to filtrations which are compatible with a supersymmetric structure. We also describe the analogous constructions for bifiltrations and bigradings.