English

Correlation Functions of Coulomb Branch Operators

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-01-26 v2

Abstract

We consider the correlation functions of Coulomb branch operators in four-dimensional N=2 Superconformal Field Theories (SCFTs) involving exactly one anti-chiral operator. These extremal correlators are the "minimal" non-holomorphic local observables in the theory. We show that they can be expressed in terms of certain determinants of derivatives of the four-sphere partition function of an appropriate deformation of the SCFT. This relation between the extremal correlators and the deformed four-sphere partition function is non-trivial due to the presence of conformal anomalies, which lead to operator mixing on the sphere. Evaluating the deformed four-sphere partition function using supersymmetric localization, we compute the extremal correlators explicitly in many interesting examples. Additionally, the representation of the extremal correlators mentioned above leads to a system of integrable differential equations. We compare our exact results with previous perturbative computations and with the four-dimensional tt^* equations. We also use our results to study some of the asymptotic properties of the perturbative series expansions we obtain in N=2 SQCD.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.05971,
  title  = {Correlation Functions of Coulomb Branch Operators},
  author = {Efrat Gerchkovitz and Jaume Gomis and Nafiz Ishtiaque and Avner Karasik and Zohar Komargodski and Silviu S. Pufu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.05971},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

47 pages, 6 figures. v2: typos corrected and references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:53:23.086Z