Boundary Terms for Massless Fermionic Fields

Abstract

Local supersymmetry leads to boundary conditions for fermionic fields in one-loop quantum cosmology involving the Euclidean normal to the boundary and a pair of independent spinor fields. This paper studies the corresponding classical properties, i.e. the classical boundary-value problem and boundary terms in the variational problem. Interestingly, a link is found with the classical boundary-value problem when spectral boundary conditions are imposed on a 3-sphere in the massless case. Moreover, the boundary term in the action functional is derived.