A Killing spinor is a nonzero supersymmetry parameter that makes the fermionic transformations vanish on a bosonic background. In undeformed minimal four-dimensional supergravity it is parallel, ; in its cosmological deformation the equation uses . Its commuting Dirac current is a Killing vector, since the spinor equation makes the symmetric covariant derivative of the current vanish. General supergravity theories also impose the vanishing of matter-fermion transformations.
For constant sectional curvature , spin curvature is . The added Clifford term in has the opposite commutator, making flat. On a simply connected region, parallel transport of any initial spinor is path independent and constructs solutions of . Thus Anti-de Sitter spacetime and its universal cover admit the associated Killing spinors locally and, with appropriate global spin data, globally.
A parallel commuting Dirac current is causal. If timelike, the geometry locally splits as a time line times a three-dimensional Ricci-flat metric; three-dimensional Ricci flatness implies flatness. If null, the stabilizer of a parallel spinor in contains only null rotations, and the local vacuum metric is with . Constant spinors obeying are parallel. These are local statements; global quotients must preserve a compatible spin structure.
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A Killing spinor is a specific type of spinor field that arises in the context of differential geometry and theoretical physics, particularly in the study of Riemannian and Lorentzian manifolds. Killing spinors generalize the notion of Killing vectors, which are associated with symmetries of a manifold.