On a bosonic background, a Killing spinor is a nonzero spinor parameter that makes all fermionic supersymmetry variations vanish. It identifies an unbroken supersymmetry of the background; the number of independent solutions counts preserved supercharges. In simple ungauged minimal four-dimensional supergravity, with the gravitino set to zero, its equation is and the bosonic field equations are . In theories with additional fields or a cosmological deformation, the Killing-spinor equation instead uses the corresponding modified connection.
Use commuting spinors to form ordinary geometric bilinears, and orient the Dirac current to the future with in mostly-plus signature. Since the spinor and gamma matrices are parallel,
Thus is actually parallel, and in particular is a Killing vector field. In a local orthonormal frame,
For every spatial unit vector , is Hermitian and squares to one. Its eigenvalues are , so . Taking along the spatial current gives
A nonzero parallel spinor cannot vanish at an isolated point, so this causal Dirac current is nonzero everywhere on a connected solution. Its squared norm is constant: it cannot alternate between timelike and null regions.
If is timelike, normalize its constant norm. Its parallel dual one-form is closed, and its orthogonal distribution is integrable. Adapted local coordinates put the metric in the product form
The time independence follows because is Killing, and the unit lapse and zero cross terms follow from parallelism. The vacuum equations give . In three dimensions the Riemann tensor is completely determined by the Ricci tensor and its scalar contraction, so is flat. Therefore
Constant spinors in its flat frame provide all local Killing spinors. Global identifications are possible only when they preserve a compatible spin structure and the required spinors.
If is null, its parallelism first gives a Brinkmann coordinate system with . The parallel-spinor condition further restricts the local spin holonomy to the stabilizer of that spinor. In four dimensions, for a nonzero Weyl component represented by , its stabilizer in is the upper-triangular group , : the two real null rotations, with no transverse rotation. Consequently the transverse frame is flat and the allowed curvature is of the wave type . Using the coordinate freedom to remove transverse cross terms gives the local plane-fronted gravitational wave form
Here and the only potentially nonzero Ricci component is , so the last equation is exactly the vacuum equation. Conversely, in the coframe , , , the nonzero spin-connection matrices are proportional to . Constant spinors with are therefore parallel. Every harmonic transverse profile, with arbitrary dependence, gives such a supersymmetric vacuum wave; the flat profile is included. This verifies both the form and sufficiency in the parallel-spinor classification of vacuum four-geometries.
There is a reality-condition subtlety in interpreting the branches. A single commuting four-dimensional Majorana spinor has a null current of a commuting Majorana spinor: its two-component representation gives . A timelike current can instead come from a Dirac Killing spinor or a sum of independent real-spinor currents. The conditional timelike classification above remains valid, but does not assert a generic timelike current for a single real Majorana parameter.
For the final question use constant sectional curvature , so . The spinor curvature identity gives
Define the Anti-de Sitter Killing-spinor connection . Since and the connection is torsion-free,
Thus the modified connection is flat. On a simply connected region, transport any initial spinor with this connection; flatness makes the result path independent and supplies actual nonzero solutions, not merely a necessary integrability condition. Hence
has a full local space of solutions on Anti-de Sitter spacetime, and globally on its universal cover. Global quotients require compatible spinor monodromy. These are Killing spinors of the cosmological deformation, not parallel-spinor vacua of the undeformed zero-cosmological-constant theory.