Anti-de Sitter Supersymmetry

We give a pedagogical introduction to certain aspects of supersymmetric field theories in anti-de Sitter space. Among them are the presence of masslike terms in massless wave equations, irreducible unitary representations and the phenomenon of multiplet shortening.Comment: Lectures presented by B. de Wit at the Winter School of Theoretical Physics, Polanica, Poland, February 1999. 23 pp., LateX file, requires packages latexsym, amsfonts, cl2emult.cl

Effective gravity and OSp(N,4) invariant matter

We re-examine the OSp(N,4) invariant interacting model of massless chiral and gauge superfields, whose superconformal invariance was instrumental, both in proving the all-order no-renormalization of the mass and chiral self-interaction lagrangians, and in determining the linear superfield renormalization needed. We show that the renormalization of the gravitational action modifies only the cosmological term, without affecting higher-order tensors. This could explain why the effect of the cosmological constant is shadowed by the effects of newtonian gravity.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, PACS: 04.65.+e, substantial revisions, to appear in Phys. Rev.