This three-volume book was conceived in the late 1980.s years as a unified presentation of supergravity and superstring theories based on the rheonomic approach to supersymmetric theories that had been invented by D'Auria & Fré in the years 1979-1980 on the basis of ideas originally put forward by Ne'eman and Regge and then was consistently developed and applied to all existing examples of supergravities by Castellani, D'Auria and Fré in the course of the following few years. Furthermore this rather monumental work aimed at reviewing also Kaluza Klein Supergravity with its corresponding mass-spectra providing at the same time all the mathematical foundations of Homogeneous Space Geometry and Harmonic Analysis.
Unfortunately when the book writing took place the use of LaTeX was not yet spread so that all the almost 2500 pages were hand-written and manually typed by our Department Secretary. The Editors composed the book in a different electronic typing and it was printed just at the time when TeX and LaTeX became the scientific standard. For this reason revised and updated editions could not be easily produced, the typewriting in LaTex of the full manuscript being a gigantic, almost impossible work. Recently one of the authors (L.Castellani) has managed to obtain a LaTeX version of the first volume.
This is the second volume of the three-volume book. It covers the explicit rheonomic construction of most relevant supergravities in D=4,
D=6 D=11 and D=10 dimensions. A detailed discussion is provided of matter coupled N=1 supergravity in D=4 introducing all the relevant Kaehler geometry definitions and structures. The second half of the book deals with Kaluza Klein Supergravity and contains detailed calculations of the mass-spectra for the 7-sphere compactification and results for other G/H manifolds.
