Self-dual supergravities Original Research Article

The N-extended supersymmetric self-dual Poincaré supergravity equations provide a natural local description of supermanifolds possessing hyperkähler structure. These equations admit an economical formulation in chiral superspace. A reformulation in harmonic superspace encodes self-dual supervielbeins and superconnections in a graded skew-symmetric supermatrix superfield prepotential satisfying generalised Cauchy-Riemann conditions. A recipe is presented for extracting explicit self-dual supervielbeins and superconnections from such “analytic” prepotentials. We demonstrate the method by explicitly decoding a simple example of superfield prepotential, analogous to that corresponding to the Taub-NUT solution. The superspace we thus construct is an interesting N = 2 supersymmetric deformation of flat space, having flat “body” and constant curvature “soul”.