A Linearized Obstruction to the Supersymmetric Extension of Conformal Boundary Conditions in Euclidean Gravity

Abstract

The conformal boundary condition for gravity fixes the boundary conformal class and the mean curvature, leaving the trace-free extrinsic curvature free as the conjugate response. It is the boundary-value form of York's conformal decomposition of gravitational data, shown to be well posed for Einstein metrics by Anderson. Witten identified it as the elliptic replacement for the ill-posed Dirichlet condition in the finite-boundary perturbative Euclidean gravitational path integral. We show that this perturbative construction admits no half-supersymmetric extension in linearized minimal supergravity. For fixed conformal bosonic data, no half-dimensional gravitino boundary condition (local or pseudodifferential, APS-type included, with any compatible ghost condition at highest-derivative order) closes the full preserved chiral supersymmetry. Supersymmetry first selects the natural local chiral gravitino datum. Acting back on this datum then produces the trace-free extrinsic curvature, precisely the response that the conformal prescription leaves unfixed. The obstruction is therefore not the failure of a particular elliptic ansatz: even the chiral/Robin completion that is LS-elliptic and BRST-compatible at highest-derivative order would impose Dirichlet control on a Neumann response. The obstruction is pointwise in tangential momentum and survives compensating gauge transformations. It is a linearized, highest-derivative obstruction, not a global or nonlinear no-go; nonlinear supercovariant boundary terms may evade it by tying the trace-free extrinsic curvature to gravitino bilinears.

30 pages, no figures; ancillary Python/NumPy verification scripts included; v2: corrected attribution of the conformal boundary condition, added a spin-1/2 warm-up and classification table in Section 3, updated acknowledgements