Continuous Spin Representations of the Poincaré and Super-Poincaré Groups

Abstract

We construct Wigner's continuous spin representations of the Poincaré algebra for massless particles in higher dimensions. The states are labeled both by the length of a space-like translation vector and the Dynkin indices of the {\it short little group} $SO(d-3)$, where $d$ is the space-time dimension. Continuous spin representations are in one-to-one correspondence with representations of the short little group. We also demonstrate how combinations of the bosonic and fermionic representations form supermultiplets of the super-Poincaré algebra. If the light-cone translations are nilpotent, these representations become finite dimensional, but contain zero or negative norm states, and their supersymmetry algebra contains a central charge in four dimensions.