Three-Dimensional Supergravity and the Cosmological Constant

Abstract

Witten has argued that in $2+1$ dimensions local supersymmetry can ensure the vanishing of the cosmological constant without requiring the equality of bose and fermi masses. We find that this mechanism is implemented in a novel fashion in the (2+1)-dimensional supersymmetric abelian Higgs model coupled to supergravity. The vortex solitons are annihilated by half of the supersymmetry transformations. The covariantly constant spinors required to define these supersymmetries exist by virtue of a surprising cancellation between the Aharonov-Bohm phase and the phase associated with the holonomy of the spin connection. However the other half of the supersymmetry transformations, whose actions ordinarily generate the soliton supermultiplet, are not well-defined and bose-fermi degeneracy is consequently absent in the soliton spectrum.