Around Susy 1970

Let me turn back to look at the past, and tell you about the history of construction of the first supersymmetric model. The papers I will shortly review have been for the most part rather inaccessible. A part of the results obtained is presented only in my Ph.D. thesis. I will also mention some lost opportunities and delusions. I graduated from the Physical Department of Moscow State University obtaining the diploma with honors in 1968. At that time, I was a co-author of two publications on some plausible charge-parity breaking effects in atomic nuclei. I dreamed of solving more ambitious problems, but this required becoming a postgraduate student. However my diploma supervisor, Yuri Shirokov, could not arrange my postgraduate studies — neither at the Physics Department of Moscow State University, where he was a Professor, nor at the Mathematics Institute of the Academy of Science, where he was a staff member. Therefore, he recommended me to Yuri Golfand who was working in the Theory Department of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences. In the late 1960's — early 70's, the staff members of the Theoretical Department were famous Soviet physicists such as Igor Tamm, Vitaliy Ginzburg,and Andrey Sakharov. At that time Golfand was still preparing his doctoral thesis [1]. A moderate height, a rapid gait and a charming well-wishing smile were to level down the differences between our ages and positions. He showed me several commutation and anticommutation relations between the operators of momentum, angular momentum and some spinors and explained to me that their consistency was verified by Ja-cobi identities. These commutation relations provided the basis for the science, which in six years was called the SuperSymmetry. At the first stage I had to establish whether the proposed algebra was unique or whether there were some alternatives. In order to do this, it was necessary to solve a system of equations for the algebra structure constants, which follow from the Jacobi identities. I restricted myself to the set of four complex spinor charges and found that there were four versions of such algebras: two of them are now known as N = 1 and N = 2 super-algebras, in two others the momentum did not commute with spinor charges (` a la de-Sitter algebra). These results were obtained in 1968 but were published later only in 1972, because their relation to physics was not immediately clear. …