One-loop divergences in simple supergravity: boundary effects

This paper studies the semiclassical approximation of simple supergravity in Riemannian four-manifolds with a boundary, within the framework of zeta-function regularization. The massless nature of gravitinos, jointly with the presence of a boundary and a local description in terms of potentials for spin 3/2, force the background to be totally flat. First, nonlocal boundary conditions of the spectral type are imposed on spin-3/2 potentials, jointly with boundary conditions on metric perturbations which are completely invariant under infinitesimal diffeomorphisms. The axial gauge-averaging functional is used, which is then sufficient to ensure self-adjointness. One, thus, finds that the contributions of ghost and gauge modes vanish separately. Hence the contributions to the one-loop wave function of the universe reduce to those zeta(0) values resulting from physical modes only. Another set of mixed boundary conditions, motivated instead by local supersymmetry and first proposed by Luckock, Moss, and Poletti, is also analyzed. In this case the contributions of gauge and ghost modes do not cancel each other. Both sets of boundary conditions lead to a nonvanishing zeta(0) value, and spectral boundary conditions are also studied when two concentric three-sphere boundaries occur. These results seem to point out that simple supergravity is not even one-loop finite in the presence of boundaries.