Physical consequences of global and local supersymmetry

In these lectures I discuss in some detail the structure and physical consequences of global and local supersymmetric (SUSY) gauge theories. Section 1 contains motivations for SUSY theories, whilst Sections 2 and 3 explain what supersymmetry is, and what are its physical properties. The observable consequences of SUSY at low energies and super-high energies are discussed in Sections 4 and 5. The physical structure of simple (N = 1) local SUSY ($ supergravity) is given in Section 6, whilst Section 7 contains the physics of simple supergravity both at super-high as well as at low energies. We find that gravitational effects, as contained in supergravity theories, may play a rather fundamental role at all energy scales. This strong interrelation between gravity and particle physics is unprecedented