Supersymmetry

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String Theory
All Roads Lead to String Theory (Polchinski)
Prior to the First Superstring Revolution
Early History	S-Matrix Theory Regge Trajectory
Bosonic String Theory	Worldsheet String Bosonic String Theory String Perturbation Theory Tachyon Condensation
Supersymmetric Revolution	Supersymmetry RNS Formalism GS Formalism BPS
Superstring Revolutions
First Superstring Revolution	GSO Projection Type II String Theory Type IIB String Theory Type IIA String Theory Type I String Theory Type H String Theory Type HO String Theory Type HE String Theory
Second Superstring Revolution	T-Duality D-Brane S-Duality Horava-Witten String Theory M-Theory Holographic Principle N=4 Super-Yang-Mills Theory AdS CFT BFSS Matrix Theory Matrix String Theory (2,0) Theory Twistor String Theory F-Theory String Field Theory Pure Spinor Formalism
After the Revolutions
Phenomenology	String Theory Landscape Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model String Phenomenology

Supersymmetry (SUSY) A postulated symmetry between bosonic and fermionic fields in Quantum Field Theoryies and String Theoryies.

The theory of Supsersymmetry has been incorporated in the Standard Model (MSSM), Yang-Mills Theory (Super-Yang-Mills Theory), and most famously String Theory (Superstring theory).

While Supersymmetry remains experimentally unconfirmed, one of its greatest achievements is that the MSSM (which also appears in realistic M-Theory vacua) predicts a Higgs of mass 125 GeV (which was measured by the LHC recently.), which is contrary to the Standard Model, which predicts such a mass to be rather unlikely.

Technical details

There are two types of supersymmetry; worldsheet supersymmetry, and spacetime supersymmetry.

Worldsheet supersymmetry

The RNS Formalism has explicit worldsheet supersymmetry. Since the RNS Action is given by adding the Polyakov Action to the Dirac Action, it is given by:

${{\mathsf{\mathcal{L}}}_ {RNS}}=\frac{T}{2} h^{\alpha \beta} \left( \partial_\alpha X^\mu \partial_\beta X^\nu +i\hbar c_0 \bar{\psi_\mu} \not{\partial} \psi^\mu \right) g_{\mu\nu}$

The supersymmetryic transformations on the worldsheet can therefore be (almost trivially, by taking variations of this above action) shown to be:

$\begin{align} \delta {X^\mu } \to \bar \epsilon {\psi ^\mu } ; \\ \delta {\psi ^\mu } \to - i \not \partial {X^\mu }\epsilon \\ \end{align}$

Spacetime Supersymmetry

The GS Formalism, or the Superspace Formalism, are with explicit spacetime supersymmetry. The supersymmetryic transformations on spacetime are (which is rather intuitive if you compare this to the RNS Worldsheet supersymmetry transformations) given by:

$\begin{align} \delta {\Theta ^{Aa}} \leftrightarrow {\varepsilon ^{Aa}} ; \\ \delta {X^\mu } \leftrightarrow {{\bar \varepsilon }^A}{\gamma ^\mu }{\Theta ^A} \\ \end{align}$