Magnetic charges in the AdS(4) superalgebra osp(4|2)

Understand

We discuss the issue of how to include magnetic charges in the AdS(4) superalgebra osp(4|2).

• It is shown that the usual way of introducing a pseudoscalar central charge on the right hand side of the basic anticommutator does not work, because this breaks SO(2,3) covariance.
• We propose a way out by promoting the magnetic charge to a vector charge, which amounts to enlarge osp(4|2) to the superconformal algebra su(2,2|1).
• The conditions for 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 BPS states are then analyzed.