Gauging image supersymmetric mechanics Original Research Article

We argue that off-shell dualities between image supermultiplets with different sets of physical bosonic components and the same number of fermionic ones are related to gauging some symmetries in the actions of the supermultiplets with maximal sets of physical bosons. Our gauging procedure uses off-shell superfields and so is manifestly supersymmetric. We focus on image supersymmetric mechanics and show that various actions of the multiplet image amount to some gauge choices in the gauged superfield actions of the linear or nonlinear image multiplets. In particular, the conformally invariant image superpotential is generated by the Fayet–Iliopoulos term of the gauge superfield. We find a new nonlinear variant of the multiplet image, such that its simplest superfield action produces the most general 4-dim hyper-Kähler metric with one triholomorphic isometry as the bosonic target metric. We also elaborate on some other instructive examples of image superfield gaugings, including a non-Abelian gauging which relates the free linear image multiplet to a self-interacting image multiplet.