Nilpotent chiral superfield in N=2 supergravity and partial rigid supersymmetry breaking

Abstract

In the framework of N=2 conformal supergravity in four dimensions, we introduce a nilpotent chiral superfield suitable for the description of partial supersymmetry breaking in maximally supersymmetric spacetimes. As an application, we construct Maxwell-Goldstone multiplet actions for partial N=2 --> N=1 supersymmetry breaking on R x S^3, AdS_3 x S^1 (or its covering AdS_3 x R), and a pp-wave spacetime. In each of these cases, the action coincides with a unique curved-superspace extension of the N=1 supersymmetric Born-Infeld action, which is singled out by the requirement of U(1) duality invariance.