Twisted superspace: Non-renormalization and fermionic symmetries in certain (heterotic string inspired) non-supersymmetric field theories

TL;DR

This paper explores a class of non-supersymmetric field theories derived from supersymmetric ones via twists, revealing residual fermionic symmetries and non-renormalization properties akin to supersymmetric theories.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for non-supersymmetric theories with fermionic symmetries and extends supergraph techniques to analyze their quantum corrections.

Findings

Presence of residual fermionic symmetries in twisted theories

Non-renormalization properties due to holomorphicity

Extended supergraph methods for non-supersymmetric corrections

Abstract

Inspired by the tachyon-free non-supersymmetric heterotic SO(16)xSO(16) string we consider a special class of non-supersymmetric field theories: Those that can be obtained from supersymmetric field theories by supersymmetry breaking twists. We argue that such theories, like their supersymmetric counter parts, may still possess some fermionic symmetries as left-overs of the super gauge transformations and have special one-loop non-renormalization properties due to holomorphicity. In addition, we extend the supergraph techniques to these theories to calculate some explicit supersymmetry-breaking corrections.