2008/04/30 by Alfred D. Shapere, Alfred D Shapere, Yuji Tachikawa 路 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy 路 #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Central charge #Conformal map #Coulomb #Dual polyhedron #Field (mathematics) #Gauge (firearms) #Gauge fixing #Gauge theory #Holomorphic function #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Supersymmetric gauge theory #hep-th
paper 路 pdf 路 doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/09/109
published as JHEP 0809:109,2008 路 38 pages, 1 figure; v2: References added, a minor error corrected. Published version
openalex publication_date 2008/09/22 路 arxiv created 2008/11/04 路 arxiv updated 2014/11/18 路 openalex created_date 2016/06/24 路 openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a general method for computing the central charges a and c of N=2 superconformal field theories corresponding to singular points in the moduli space of N=2 gauge theories. Our method relates a and c to the U(1)R anomalies of the topologically twisted gauge theory. We evaluate these anomalies by studying the holomorphic dependence of the path integral measure on the moduli. We calculate a and c for superconformal points in a variety of gauge theories, including N=4 SU(N), N=2 pure SU(N) Yang-Mills, and USp(2N) with 1 massless antisymmetric and 4 massive fundamental hypermultiplets. In the latter case, we reproduce the conformal and flavor central charges previously calculated using the gravity duals of these gauge theories. For any SCFT in the class under consideration, we derive a previously conjectured expression for 2a-c in terms of the sum of the dimensions of operators parameterizing the Coulomb branch. Finally, we prove that the ratio a/c is bounded above by 5/4 and below by 1/2.