Global properties of supermanifolds (Q1064629)

The authors investigate the topological structure of supermanifolds. Two classes of supermanifolds appear in the literature. The first class contains supermanifolds constructed as vector bundles over an ordinary space-time manifold, the ''body manifold'', and the second class is made up of quotient spaces of flat superspaces by discrete groups. The authors give two new examples, one for each class. The first example is a super projective space, and the second one exhibits a supermanifold with nonabelian fundamental group and torsion in its first homology group. Furthermore, they find necessary topological conditions for a real manifold to admit a super structure, and topological restrictions for the existence of globally defined superfields by investigating the foliation structure of a supermanifold.