Quaternionic, quaternionic Kähler, and hyper-Kähler supermanifolds (Q1196076)

Quaternionic Kähler and hyper-Kähler geometries are of increasing interest to both mathematicians and physicists. In particular these geometries determine locally supersymmetric interactions of bosons and fermions in four-dimensional spacetime. The purpose of this paper is to construct proper supersymmetric extensions of hyper-Kähler and quaternionic Kähler manifolds. Following [\textit{Yu. I. Manin}, Gauge fields and complex geometry (Moskva: Nauka) (1984; Zbl 0576.53002)], there is defined an almost quaternionic supermanifold of dimension \((4k| 2k+2)\), \(k\geq 2\). An invariant of the almost quaternionic structure is constructed in terms of a natural super-connection and when this invariant vanishes, the structure is said to be quaternionic. Explicit expressions of torsion and curvature tensors are used to prove two statements: i) The underlying \(4k\)-dimensional manifold of a quaternionic supermanifold has the induced quaternionic structure; ii) to any \((4k\mid 2k+2)\)-dimensional quaternionic supermanifold \(M\) there corresponds a \((2k+1\mid 1)\)-dimensional twistor superspace parametrizing \(\alpha\)-supersurfaces in \(M\).