WHAT IF DIRAC PIONINI EXISTED IN A PURELY CHIRAL SUPER-FIELD FORMULATION

By an explicit construction it is shown that the geometry of the SU(3) pion multiplet with respect to the group manifold SUL(3) x SUR(3) may be deformed to admit a second pseudoscalar multiplet that is analogou s to the Z(0) in unified theories of the electroweak interaction. This observation is found to play a key role in the construction of the N = 1 supersymmetric models with pions and Dirac-like spin-1/2 superpart ners ('pionini'). Recent results suggest that models of the type descr ibed necessarily arise in constructions involving manifest off-shell i rreducible N = 2 hypermultiplets. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All r ights reserved.