Kaluza-Klein reductions of maximally supersymmetric five-dimensional lorentzian spacetimes

Abstract

A recent study of filtered deformations of (graded subalgebras of) the minimal five-dimensional Poincaré superalgebra resulted in two classes of maximally supersymmetric spacetimes. One class are the well-known maximally supersymmetric backgrounds of minimal five-dimensional supergravity, whereas the other class does not seem to be related to supergravity. This paper is a study of the Kaluza--Klein reductions to four dimensions of this latter class of maximally supersymmetric spacetimes. We classify the lorentzian and riemannian Kaluza--Klein reductions of these backgrounds, determine the fraction of the supersymmetry preserved under the reduction and in most cases determine explicitly the geometry of the four-dimensional quotient. Among the many supersymmetric quotients found, we highlight a number of novel non-homogeneous four-dimensional lorentzian spacetimes admitting $N=1$ supersymmetry, whose supersymmetry algebra is not a filtered deformation of any graded subalgebra of the four-dimensional $N=1$ Poincaré superalgebra. Any of these four-dimensional lorentzian spacetimes may serve as the arena for the construction of new rigidly supersymmetric field theories.