2009/11/28 by Daniel Butter, Butter, Daniel
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0911.5426
67 pages. Added missing references to introduction
openalex publication_date 2009/11/28 · arxiv created 2009/12/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We apply the heat kernel method (using Avramidi's non-recursive technique) to the study of the effective action of chiral matter in a complex representation of an arbitrary gauge sector coupled to background U(1) supergravity. This generalizes previous methods, which restricted to 1) real representations of the gauge sector in traditional Poincaré supergravity or 2) vanishing supergravity background. In this new scheme, we identify a classical ambiguity in these theories which mixes the supergravity U(1) with the gauge U(1). At the quantum level, this ambiguity is maintained since the effective action changes only by a local counterterm as one shifts a U(1) factor between the supergravity and gauge sectors. An immediate application of our formalism is the calculation of the one-loop gauge, Kahler, and reparametrization anomalies of chiral matter coupled to minimal supergravity from purely chiral loops. Our approach gives an anomaly whose covariant part is both manifestly supersymmetric and non-perturbative in the Kahler potential.