The role of the 1.5 order formalism and the gauging of spacetime groups in the development of gravity and supergravity theories

Abstract

The 1.5 formalism played a key role in the discovery of supergravity and it has been used to prove the invariance of essentially all supergravity theories under local supersymmetry. It emerged from the gauging of the super Poincare group to find supergravity. We review both of these developments as well as the auxiliary fields for simple supergravity and its most general coupling to matter using the tensor calculus.