Anomaly Matching Across Dimensions and Supersymmetric Cardy Formulae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to compute anomaly-induced contributions to the effective action at finite temperature directly from the anomaly polynomial, enabling analysis of superconformal indices and SCFTs without Lagrangian descriptions.

Contribution

It develops a general anomaly polynomial-based approach to determine finite-temperature effects and asymptotic behaviors of superconformal indices, including new relations for 6d theories.

Findings

Calculated anomaly contributions from the polynomial for various theories.

Reproduced known superconformal index asymptotics using equivariant integration.

Established a new relation between 6d SCFTs and their anomaly polynomial.

Abstract

't Hooft anomalies are known to induce specific contributions to the effective action at finite temperature. We present a general method to directly calculate such contributions from the anomaly polynomial of a given theory, including a term which involves a $U(1)$ connection for the thermal circle isometry. Based on this observation, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the superconformal index of $4d$ $\mathcal{N}=1$ theories on the "second sheet" can be calculated by integrating the anomaly polynomial on a particular background. The integration is then performed by an equivariant method to reproduce known results. Our method only depends on the anomaly polynomial and therefore the result is applicable to theories without known Lagrangian formulation. We also present a new formula that relates the behavior of $6d$ $\mathcal{N}=(1,0)$ SCFTs on the second sheet to the anomaly polynomial.