English

Instanton corrections to the effective action of N=4 SYM

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-05-30 v3

Abstract

We compute the one-instanton effective action of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory with gauge group Sp(2N). The result can be written in a very compact and manifestly supersymmetric form involving an integral over the superspace of an irrational function of the N=4 on-shell superfields. In the Coulomb branch, the instanton corrects both the MHV and next-to-next-MHV higher derivative terms D^4F^{2n+2} and F^{2n+4}. We confirm at the non-perturbative level the non-renormalization theorems for MHV F^{2n+2} terms that are expected to receive perturbative corrections only at n-loops. We compute also the one and two-loop corrections to the D^4F^4 term and show that its completion under SL(2,Z) duality is consistent with the one-instanton results of U(2) gauge group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.00554,
  title  = {Instanton corrections to the effective action of N=4 SYM},
  author = {Massimo Bianchi and Jose Francisco Morales and Congkao Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.00554},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

25 pages, 2 figures; v2: 26 pages, 2 figures, typos corrected, match the published version; v3: eq.(5.14) corrected