Observables in Topological Theories: A Superspace Formulation

The structure of topological quantum field theories on the compact Kahler manifold is interpreted. The BRST transformations of fields are derived from universal bundle and the observables are found from the second Chern class of universal bundle.

The supersymmetric standard model (SSM) appears to be firmly grounded in superspace. For example, it would be natural to assume that all the physically important composite operators can be made by combining superfields and superspace derivatives. But even for the simplest possible, free, massless and unbroken SUSY theory in 3+1 dimensions, this is not true. This paper shows that there is a large set of physically important composite operators in the SSM that require explicit ...

An algebraic cohomological characterization of a class of linearly broken Ward identities is provided. The examples of the topological vector supersymmetry and of the Landau ghost equation are discussed in detail. The existence of such a linearly broken Ward identities turns out to be related to BRST exact antifield dependent cocycles with negative ghost number.

We revisit the construction of topological Yang-Mills theories of the Witten type with arbitrary space-time dimension and number of ``shift supersymmetry'' generators, using a superspace formalism. The super-BF structure of these theories is exploited in orderto determine their actions uniquely, up to the ambiguities due to the fixing of the Yang-Mills and BF gauge invariance. UV finiteness to all orders of perturbation theory is proved in a gauge of the Landau type.

We describe a pure spinor BRST cohomology framework to compactly represent ten-dimensional one-loop amplitudes involving any number of massless open- and closed-string states. The method of previous work to construct scalar and vectorial BRST invariants in pure spinor superspace signals the appearance of the hexagon gauge anomaly when applied to tensors. We study the systematics of the underlying BRST anomaly by defining the notion of pseudo-cohomology. This leads to a rich n...

Pauli-Villars regularization of Yang-Mills theories and of supergravity theories is outlined, with an emphasis on BRST invariance. Applications to phenomenology and the anomaly structure of supergravity are discussed.

A superspace approach to the Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) formalism for the Yang-Mills theory on an n-dimensional unit sphere, S_1^{n}, is developed in a manifestly covariant manner based on the rotational supersymmetry characterized by the supergroup OSp(n+1|2). This is done by employing an (n+2)-dimensional unit supersphere, S_1^{n|2}, parametrized by n commutative and 2 anticommutative coordinate variables so that it includes S_1^{n} as a subspace and realizes the OSp(...

In the present paper we analyze algebraic structures arising in Yang-Mills theory. The paper should be considered as a part of a project started with a paper "On maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories" devoted to maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories. In this paper we collected those of our results which are correct without assumption of supersymmetry and used them to give rigorous proofs of some results of the cited paper. We consider two different algebraic int...

In this paper we discuss the BRST-quantization of anomalous 2d-Yang Mills (YM) theory. Since we use an oscillator basis for the YM-Fock-space the anomaly appears already for a pure YM-system and the constraints form a Kac-Moody algebra with negative central charge. We also discuss the coupling of chiral fermions and find that the BRST-cohomology for systems with chiral fermions in a sufficiently large representation of the gauge group is completely equivalent to the cohomolog...

Lectures given at the First School on Field Theory and Gravitation, Vit\'{o}ria, Esp\'{\i}rito Santo, Brazil, 15-19 April, 1997.