We construct N=1 supersymmetrisations of some recently-proposed theories of
critical gravity, conformal gravity, and extensions of critical gravity in four
dimensions. The total action consists of the sum of three separately off-shell
supersymmetric actions containing Einstein gravity, a cosmological term and the
square of the Weyl tensor. For generic choices of the coefficients for these
terms, the excitations of the resulting theory around an AdS_4 background
describe massive spin-2 and massless spin-2 modes coming from the metric;
massive spin-1 modes coming from a vector field in the theory; and massless and
massive spin-3/2 modes (with two unequal masses) coming from the gravitino.
These assemble into a massless and a massive N=1 spin-2 multiplet. In critical
supergravity, the coefficients are tuned so that the spin-2 mode in the massive
multiplet becomes massless. In the supersymmetrised extensions of critical
gravity, the coefficients are chosen so that the massive modes lie in a
"window" of lowest energies E_0 such that these ghostlike fields can be
truncated by imposing appropriate boundary conditions at infinity, thus leaving
just positive-norm massless supergravity modes.Comment: 29 page