Dressing fields for supersymmetry: the cases of the Rarita-Schwinger and gravitino fields

A bstract In this paper we argue that the gauge-fixing conditions typically used to extract the (off-shell) degrees of freedom of the Rarita-Schwinger spinor-vector and gravitino, respectively in rigid supersymmetric field theory and supergravity, are actually instances of the dressing field method of symmetry reduction. Since the latter has a natural relation interpretation, solving the “gauge-fixing condition” — or, better, “dressing functional constraints” — actually realises the Rarita-Schwinger spinor-vector and the gravitino fields as (non-local) relational variables. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of the dressing field method to supersymmetric theories.