Comments on supercurrent multiplets, supersymmetric field theories and supergravity

By Z. Komargodski, N. Seiberg. 2010

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze various supersymmetry multiplets containing the supercurrent and the energy-momentum tensor. The most widely known such multiplet, the Ferrara-Zumino (FZ) multiplet, is not always well-defined. This can happen once Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) terms are present or when the Kähler form of the target space is not exact. We present a new multiplet $ {\mathcal{S}_{\alpha \dot{\alpha }}} $ which always exists. This understanding of the supersymmetry current allows us to obtain new results about the possible IR behavior of supersymmetric theories. Next, we discuss the coupling of rigid supersymmetric theories to supergravity. When the theory has an FZ-multiplet or it has a global R-symmetry the standard formalism can be used. But when this is not the case such simple gauging is impossible. Then, we must gauge the current $ {\mathcal{S}_{\alpha \dot{\alpha }}} $. The resulting theory has, in addition to the graviton and the gravitino, another massless chiral superfield Φ which is essential for the consistency of the theory. Some of the moduli of various string models play the role of Φ. Our general considerations, which are based on the consistency of supergravity, show that such moduli cannot be easily lifted thus leading to constraints on gravity/string models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d94737603f7b9b6c77b668ea8fbac4f7ddf60191

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Citations in the corpus

Supercurrents and brane currents in diverse dimensions (2011, methodology): “10), and this is not gauge invariant [10,13].”
Exploring curved superspace (2012, background): “In general, the supercurrent multiplet Sμ contains 16 + 16 independent operators [42,43].”
The geometry of supersymmetric partition functions (2013, background): “ronger result if it is possible to improve the R-multiplet to an FZmultiplet, i.e. if the ﬁeld theory does not possess any FI-terms and the Kahler form of the target space for chiral scalars is exact [18,6]. In this case one can ﬁnd a well-deﬁned operator Aµ, such that Fµν = ∂µAν− ∂νAµ. Substituting”
Comments on 3d Seiberg-like dualities (2011, background): “On the other hand, the supersymmetric gauging of the R-symmetry is more subtle; see [26, 21, 27] for recent discussions.”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “22 A very different perspective on this fact was recently given in [693].”
Contact terms, unitarity, and F -maximization in three-dimensional superconformal theories (2012, background): “For a recent discussion, see [38,39,30] and references therein.”
Symmetries and Strings in Field Theory and Gravity (2010, methodology): “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.”
The exact superconformal R-symmetry extremizes Z (2010, background): “The couplings to curvature are uniquely determined given thatR-multiplet.”
Supersymmetric field theories on three-manifolds (2012, background): “(They are closely related to supercurrents in four-dimensional N = 1 theories [36,35].”
Cardy formulae for SUSY theories in d = 4 and d = 6 (2014, background): “upergravity in four dimensions [30]. At the linearized level, the supergravity ﬁelds couple to a supercurrent multiplet which contains a conserved R-current. For the general formalism see for example [31,32]. It has been recently studied at the non-linear level by [33]. 8 This Lagrangian can be foun”
Deformations of superconformal theories (2016, background): “rents Sµα,Sµα˙ and stress-tensor Tµν. Unlike thesuperconformal case, therepresentation theory ofthePoincar´e supersymmetry algebra admits several diﬀerent non-conformal stress-tensor multiplets. (See [57,58] and references therein for a detailed discussion.) The most common such multiplet is Ferrara”
Rigid supersymmetric theories in curved superspace (2011, background): “We comment on the impossibility to put a theory without an FZ-multiplet in AdS and on the fact that arguments of holomorphy which are very powerful in flat space are not useful in this case.”