World-Sheet Supersymmetry

Soon after the appearance of the papers reprinted in Chapter 2, it was observed by Gervais and Sakita [1] that Ramond fermions and dual pion model bosons could be described by a supersymmetric two-dimensional action principle. Around the same time, Aharonov et al. [2] introduced the idea of a "spinning string". While it did not explicitly spell out supersymmetry, their work clearly involved closely related ideas. The spinning-string picture is also discussed in [3]. The two-dimensional world-sheet supersymmetry of the spinning string theory was developed further by Zumino [4]. This paper is of some historical interest, since it shows where his thinking stood shortly before his important work with Wess [5]…