Infinite chiral symmetry in four dimensions (Q2018324): Difference between revisions

Supersymmetric quantum field theories have a wealth of ``protected'' quantities, which due to their essentially classical nature with finite number of corrections, provide a controlled and insightful perspective. However, for non-Lagrangian theories, the available tool-box is far more limited. Nevertheless, there has been a recent resurgence of progress using conformal field theory techiques such as bootstrap. In the archetypal \(N=4\) theory, the protected part of certain correlators can be entirely determined by symmetry and holomorphicity considerations alone. One of the achievements of the current paper is to establish a framework which explains and vastly generalizes this to lower supersymmetry. This is done by defining a map \(\chi\) from the space of 4-dimensional \(N=2\) super-conformal field theories to the space of 2-dimensional chiral algebras, by having the meromorphic correlators of the latter computing correlators in a protected sector of the former (cf. Equation 2.27 in the paper). The infinite chiral symmetry in the 2-dimensional CFT has profound consequences in the 4-d, from SCFT Ward identities to central charge and unitarity bounds, as well as the super-conformal index. The paper also discusses a nice collection of explicit examples at the end, such as \(SU(N)\) QCD, \(N=4\) super-Yang-Mills, as well as the so-called calss \({\mathcal S}\) theories which are obtained by compactification of \((2,0)\) 6-dimensional SCFTs on a Riemann surface with punctures. To conclude, a set of open questions is listed to further entice the readers.