Wess-Zumino term for the AdS superstring and generalized Inonu-Wigner contraction

Abstract

We examine a Wess-Zumino term, written in bilinear of superinvariant currents, for a superstring in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. The standard Inonu-Wigner contraction does not give the correct flat limit but gives zero. This originates from the fact that the fermionic metric of the super-Poincare group is degenerate. We propose a generalization of the Inonu-Wigner contraction which reduces the super-AdS group to the "nondegenerate" super-Poincare group, therefore it gives a correct flat limit of this Wess-Zumino term. We also discuss the M-algebra obtained by this generalized Inonu-Wigner contraction from osp(1|32).