Mass-deformed Super Yang-Mills theory on $\mathbb T^4$: sum over twisted sectors, $\mathbf{\theta}$-angle, and CP violation
Abstract
We study super Yang-Mills theory with a small gaugino mass and vacuum angle on the four-torus with 't Hooft twisted boundary conditions. Introducing a detuning parameter , which measures the deviation from an exactly self-dual , and working in the limits and , where is the torus size and the strong-coupling scale, we compute the scalar and pseudo-scalar condensates to leading order in . The twists generate fractional-charge instantons, and we show that summing over all such contributions is crucial for reproducing the correct physical observables in the decompactified strong-coupling regime. From a Hamiltonian perspective, the sum over twisted sectors, already at small torus size, projects in the limit onto a definite superselection sector of the theory. In the massless limit, we recover the exact value of the gaugino condensate , and demonstrate how a spurious symmetry eliminates all -violating effects. Our results are directly testable in lattice simulations, and our method extends naturally to non-supersymmetric gauge theories.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.00157,
title = {Mass-deformed Super Yang-Mills theory on $\mathbb T^4$: sum over twisted sectors, $\mathbf{\theta}$-angle, and CP violation},
author = {Mohamed M. Anber and Erich Poppitz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.00157},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
52 pages+appendices; typos corrected, matches the published version