REMEMBERING THE EARLY TIMES OF SUPERSYMMETRY
This is a slightly revised excerpt from a paper published in Yuri Golfand Memorial Volume The Many Faces of the Superworld, (World Scientific, Singapore, 2000).
As is well known, supersymmetry started long before the Iron Curtain was dismantled, and thus came into existence separately in the West and in the former Soviet Union. In order to speak about what I know personally, I will recall that in the West, superalgebras were first considered by A. Neveu, J. Schwarz and P. Ramond as a basic tool to eliminate negative norm states from the spinning string theories. When Neveu, Schwarz and Ramond first introduced them they were initially referred to as supergauges. These authors used the covariant harmonic oscillator approach, the only known technique at the time, without field-theoretic interpretation. Preparing the present text brought back wonderful memories of the time when my long lasting collaboration and friendship with Bunji Sakitac began. In 1970-71 we started to develop the world–sheet interpretation of the spinning string (unknown at that early time), extending earlier discussions of the purely bosonic case begun by H. Hsue B. Sakita and M. Virasoro1. We recognized that the Neveu-Schwarz-Ramond (NSR) models included world-sheet two-dimensional Dirac spinor fields, in addition to the world sheet scalar fields, common with the Virasoro model. We showed that the supergauges of the NSR models corresponded to the fact that the two-dimensional world-sheet Lagrangian was invariant under transformations with anticommuting parameters which mixed the scalar and spinor fields. This gave the first example of a supersymmetric local Lagrangian (albeit, two-dimensional)…
