Comments on the Fayet-Iliopoulos term in field theory and supergravity

By Z. Komargodski, N. Seiberg. 2009

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A careful analysis of the Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) model shows that its energy momentum tensor and supersymmetry current are not gauge invariant. Since the corresponding charges are gauge invariant, the model is consistent. However, our observation about the currents gives a new perspective on its restrictive renormalization group flow and explains why FI-terms never appear in dynamical supersymmetry breaking. This lack of gauge invariance is at the root of the complications of coupling the model to supergravity. We show that this is possible only if the full supergravity theory (including all higher derivative corrections) has an additional exact continuous global symmetry. A consistent quantum gravity theory cannot have such symmetries and hence FI-terms cannot appear. Our results have consequences for various models of particle physics and cosmology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6861d863260771b9a77e4692980e0df0d6df4a7e

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Citations in the corpus

The geometry of supersymmetric partition functions (2013, background): “Under these conditions the flat-space theory does not admit a Ferrara-Zumino (FZ) supercurrent multiplet [6, 18].”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “10 A criticism of D-term inflation based on consistency conditions in supergravity can be found in [518].”
Supercurrents and brane currents in diverse dimensions (2011, background): “Supercurrent multiplets have been studied by many authors [5-16]; see also section 7.”
From Linear SUSY to Constrained Superfields (2009, background): “In this case the operator X is not gauge invariant [27] and we do not discuss it here.”
Rigid supersymmetric theories in curved superspace (2011, unknown): “In the WZ-model this can be identified with Kähler transformations K → K − 3(Ω + Ω) [45].”
Symmetries and Strings in Field Theory and Gravity (2010, background): “As we will now see, the discussion above allows us to streamline and to reinterpret some recent results about constraints on supergravity [8,9,6] and to further extend them.”
Deformations of superconformal theories (2016, background): “sigma models whose target spaces contain compact two-cycles [59, 57, 58].”
Signature of supersymmetry from the early universe (2011, background): “In fact, mostly D-term breaking has been shown to be incompatible with well-defined current multiplets [33, 34].”
Generalized global symmetries (2014, background): “This interpretation of the FI-term is tied with the fact that it is related to a one-form central charge in the supersymmetry algebra [14, 37] (and hence to BPS vortices) — the central charge equals a sum of products of an FI-term and the corresponding one-form symmetry charge.”
Contact terms, unitarity, and F -maximization in three-dimensional superconformal theories (2012, background): “For a recent discussion, see [38,39,30] and references therein.”