Supergravity Before and After 1976

In review articles and monographs on supergravity, its discovery is usually dated as 1976. However, a number of papers on supergravity appeared before 1976, beginning from 1972 [1–5]. As has now been confirmed, those papers are directly related to the established version of supergravity [6,7] and in some sense were the starting points for later ones. In this paper, I will try to fill in the historical gap (1972–1976). Supergravity is the gauged version of global supersymmetry. Therefore I will begin by exposing briefly those elements of supersymmetry which are essential for the sequel.

Supersymmetry has been independently discovered by three groups of authors: Yu. Gol’fand and E. Lichtman [8]; D. Volkov and V. Akulov [1]; J. Wess and B. Zumino [9]. The motivations and starting points used by these three groups were quite different. In [8] the motivation was to introduce a parity violation into the quantum field theory. The starting point of the papers [1,2] was the question whether...