Supergravity Interactions in the SU(4)XU(1)Vacuum of Global Supersymmetry

Abstract

It is shown that quarks and leptons can couple intrinsically to pure supergravity, preserving for this context the degeneracy of globally supersymmetric vacua, and specifically preserving the vacuum that is characterized by SU(4)XU(1). A fundamental representation of SUSY SU(4)XU(1) is constructed in terms of quarks, and it is demonstrated that the symmetry of this fundamental representation is invariant under supergravity interactions that produce quark-lepton transitions. The importance of this tensorial flavor structure is that it predicts a new, seventh quark of charge -1/3, a left-handed (non-strange) version of the strange quark.