Lecture Series on Supersymmetry

The intention of this lecture series is to provide graduate students with both an overview over this topic as well as the tools necessary to do research involving supersymmetric field theories themselves.

Supersymmetric field theories are the most promising extensions of the standard model of elementary particles, and they provide solutions to many of the remaining puzzles. It yields also a nice extension of general relativity and is one of the central ingredients in superstring theories.

Although the lectures will be rather elementary and aimed at students, everybody is welcome to attend.

Outline

The outline of the lectures is roughly as follows:

  • The Lorentz Group and Spinors
  • The Supersymmetry Algebra
  • Superfield Formalism
  • Non-Renormalization Theorems
  • Super Feynman Rules
  • Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories
  • Sketch of the Seiberg-Witten solution to N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory
Times and location

The lecture will take place on Thursdays from 5p to 6.30p in Synge lecture theatre, Trinity College Dublin. This room is located on the ground floor of the Hamilton building. A map of the campus is available here.

Lecture notes

Anton Ilderton did an amazing job with writing up the lecture notes in a nice format and providing solutions to the various exercises left to the audience during the lecture.

  • J. Wess and J. Bagger, “Supersymmetry and supergravity,” Princeton, USA: Univ. Pr. (1992).
  • S. Weinberg, “The quantum theory of fields. Vol. 3: Supersymmetry,” Cambridge, UK: Univ. Pr. (2000).
  • I. L. Buchbinder and S. M. Kuzenko, “Ideas and methods of supersymmetry and supergravity: Or a walk through superspace,” Bristol, UK: IOP (1998).
  • A. V. Proeyen, “Tools for supersymmetry,” hep-th/9910030.
  • Stephen P. Martin, “A supersymmetry primer,” hep-ph/9709356.
  • A. Bilal, “Introduction to supersymmetry,” hep-th/0101055.
  • Joseph D. Lykken, “Introduction to supersymmetry,” hep-th/9612114.
  • S. Gates, M. Grisaru, M. Rocek and W. Siegel, “Superspace, Or One Thousand And One Lessons In Supersymmetry” hep-th/0108200.
Further reading and references
  • E. Witten, “Dynamical breaking of supersymmetry,” Nucl. Phys. B 188 (1981) 513.
  • E. Witten, “Constraints on supersymmetry breaking,” Nucl. Phys. B 202 (1982) 253.
  • Marcus T. Grisaru, W. Siegel and M. Rocek, “Improved methods for supergraphs,” Nucl. Phys. B 159 (1979) 429.
  • I. Jack and D. R. T. Jones, “Regularisation of supersymmetric theories,” hep-ph/9707278.
  • W. Siegel, “Supersymmetric dimensional regularization via dimensional reduction,” Phys. Lett. B 84 (1979) 193.
  • L. Brink, John H. Schwarz and J. Scherk, “Supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories,” Nucl. Phys. B 121 (1977) 77.
  • John P. Harnad and S. Shnider, “Constraints and field equations for ten-dimensional super Yang-Mills theory,” Commun. Math. Phys. 106 (1986) 183.
  • On his website, Warren Siegel, who contributed a lot to the development of superspace, has a number of quite funny parody papers on supersymmetry and string theory.