Unconventional Supersymmetry via the Dressing Field Method

Abstract: Unconventional supersymmetry is a proposal, introduced by Alvarez-Valenzuela-Zanelli (AVZ), aiming to use the framework of supersymmetric field theory to describe fermionic matter fields and bosonic gauge fields in a unified way, as both parts of a single superconnection. It hinges upon the so-called matter ansatz. Unfortunately, the formal and conceptual status of the ansatz remained unclear, preventing unconventional supersymmetry to be used in a principled way as a general approach beyond the model in which it was first considered. In this letter, we lift this restriction by showing that the ansatz is a special case of the Dressing Field Method, a new systematic tool to exhibit the gauge-invariant content of general-relativistic gauge field theories.