Boundary terms for massless fermionic fields

Local supersymmetry leads to boundary conditions for fermionic fields in one-loop quantum cosmology involving the Euclidean normal _e n _A/A to the boundary and a pair of independent spinor fields ^A and . This paper studies the corresponding classical properties, i.e., the classical boundary-value problem and boundary terms in the variational problem. If is set to zero on a 3-sphere bounding flat Euclidean 4-space, the modes of the massless spin–1/2 field multiplying harmonics having positive eigenvalues for the intrinsic 3-dimensional Dirac operator onS ³ should vanish onS ³. Remarkably, this coincides with the property of the classical boundary-value problem when spectral boundary conditions are imposed onS ³ in the massless case. Moreover, the boundary term in the action functional is proportional to the integral on the boundary of ^A _e n _AA ^A .