Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 iii Paper 60 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Work through terms quadratic in the fermions, with Grassmann-odd Majorana spinors and . At this order the spin connection can be taken torsion-free: eliminating its gravitino-induced torsion changes the action only at four-fermion order. The Christoffel term needed to turn the printed into a full vector-spinor covariant derivative drops out after contraction with , since the connection is symmetric in .
First establish the Einstein tensor contraction of spin curvature. Expanding the Clifford product and using the first Bianchi identity, its five-gamma and antisymmetric three-gamma curvature contributions vanish, leavingSince , it follows thatThe factor arises from antisymmetrizing the two derivatives, not from a choice of Einstein-Hilbert normalization.
For the Einstein-Hilbert action, the metric variation isVariation with respect to the covariant metric, including the determinant variation and discarding the usual boundary divergence, givesNo gravitational field equation has been assumed here.
For the Rarita-Schwinger field action, the determinant, gamma-matrix and connection variations each multiply a term already quadratic in . Since is bilinear in , these contributions have four fermionic factors and are outside the requested order. Retain only the variations of the two explicit gravitino factors. The four-dimensional Majorana bilinear interchange gives for odd spinors. After integration by parts, the first gravitino variation iswhere the last step swaps and reverses the three-gamma sign. It is exactly equal to the variation of the second gravitino factor. ThereforeThe curvature contribution cancels pointwise. Thusup to boundary terms and the omitted four-fermion-order variations. This directly proves the stated local supersymmetry invariance with its printed coefficients. At higher order, the torsion and quartic-fermion completion of minimal four-dimensional supergravity is needed; it cannot be inferred by dropping the terms indefinitely.