Supergroup structure of Jackiw-Teitelboim supergravity

Abstract

We develop the gauge theory formulation of N = 1 Jackiw-Teitelboim supergravity in terms of the underlying OSp(1|2, ℝ) supergroup, focusing on boundary dynamics and the exact structure of gravitational amplitudes. We prove that the BF description reduces to a super-Schwarzian quantum mechanics on the holographic boundary, where boundary-anchored Wilson lines map to bilocal operators in the super-Schwarzian theory. A classification of defects in terms of monodromies of OSp(1|2, ℝ) is carried out and interpreted in terms of character insertions in the bulk. From a mathematical perspective, we construct the principal series representations of OSp(1|2, ℝ) and show that whereas the corresponding Plancherel measure does not match the density of states of N = 1 JT supergravity, a restriction to the positive subsemigroup OSp+(1|2, ℝ) yields the correct density of states, mirroring the analogous results for bosonic JT gravity. We illustrate these results with several gravitational applications, in particular computing the late-time complexity growth in JT supergravity.