Nilpotent deformations of N=2 superspace -: art. no. 012

We investigate deformations of four-dimensional N = (1, 1) euclidean superspace induced by nonanticommuting fermionic coordinates. We essentially use the harmonic superspace approach and consider nilpotent bi-differential Poisson operators only. One variant of such deformations (termed chiral nilpotent) directly generalizes the recently studied chiral deformation of N = (1/2, 1/2) superspace. It preserves chirality and harmonic analyticity but generically breaks N = (1, 1) to N - (1, 0) supersymmetry. Yet, for degenerate choices of the constant deformation matrix N - (1, 1/2) supersymmetry can be retained, i.e. a fraction of 3/4. An alternative version (termed analytic nilpotent) imposes minimal nonanticommutativity on the analytic coordinates of harmonic superspace. It does not affect the analytic subspace and respects all supersymmetries, at the expense of chirality however. For a chiral nilpotent deformation, we present non (anti) commutative euclidean analogs of N = 2 Maxwell and hypermultiplet off-shell actions.