Observables in Topological Theories: A Superspace Formulation

By using supermanifold techniques we prove a generalization of the localization formula in equivariant cohomology which is suitable for studying supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories in terms of ADHM data. With these techniques one can compute the reduced partition functions of topological super Yang-Mills theory with 4, 8 or 16 supercharges. More generally, the superlocalization formula can be applied to any topological field theory in any number of dimensions.

This survey discusses our results and conjectures concerning supersymmetric field theories and their relationship to cohomology theories. A careful definition of supersymmetric Euclidean field theories is given, refining Segal's axioms for conformal field theories. We state and give an outline of the proof of various results relating field theories to cohomology theories.

The paper concerns standard supersymmetry algebras in diverse dimensions, involving bosonic translational generators and fermionic supersymmetry generators. A cohomology related to these supersymmetry algebras, termed supersymmetry algebra cohomology, and corresponding "primitive elements" are defined by means of a BRST-type coboundary operator. A method to systematically compute this cohomology is outlined and illustrated by simple examples.

We extend previous work on antifield dependent local BRST cohomology for matter coupled gauge theories of Yang-Mills type to the case of gauge groups that involve free abelian factors. More precisely, we first investigate in a model independent way how the dynamics enters the computation of the cohomology for a general class of Lagrangians in general spacetime dimensions. We then discuss explicit solutions in the case of specific models. Our analysis has implications for the ...

We propose a systematic way of finding solutions to classical Yang-Mills equation with nontrivial topology. This approach is based on one of Wightman axioms for quantum field theory, which is referred to as form invariance condition in this paper. For a given gauge group and a spacetime with certain isometries, thanks to this axiom that imposes strong constraints on the general Ansatz, a systematic way of solving Yang-Mills equation can be obtained in both flat and curved spa...

The paper provides a framework for a systematic analysis of the local BRST cohomology in a large class of gauge theories. The approach is based on the cohomology of s+d in the jet space of fields and antifields, s and d being the BRST operator and exterior derivative respectively. It relates the BRST cohomology to an underlying gauge covariant algebra and reduces its computation to a compactly formulated problem involving only suitably defined generalized connections and tens...

The scalar and vector topological Yang-Mills symmetries determine a closed and consistent sector of Yang-Mills supersymmetry. We provide a geometrical construction of these symmetries, based on a horizontality condition on reducible manifolds. This yields globally well-defined scalar and vector topological BRST operators. These operators generate a subalgebra of maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, which is small enough to be closed off-shell with a finite set of auxil...

The supersymmetric version of the descent equations following from the Wess-Zumino consistency condition is discussed. A systematic framework in order to solve them is proposed.

The origin of non-renormalization theorems in field theories with global supersymmetry can be traced to the fact that supersymmetric actions can be viewed as the highest components of respective supermultiplets. Supersymmetric interactions in particular can therefore be represented as supersymmetry variations of lower dimensional field polynomials. We investigate here this algebraic structure in the context of the Wess-Zumino model and N=1 and N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills th...

In this letter we argue that instanton-dominated Green's functions in N=2 Super Yang-Mills theories can be equivalently computed either using the so-called constrained instanton method or making reference to the topological twisted version of the theory. Defining an appropriate BRST operator (as a supersymmetry plus a gauge variation), we also show that the expansion coefficients of the Seiberg-Witten effective action for the low-energy degrees of freedom can be written as in...