Low-Energy Effective Action in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theories

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in constructing the low-energy effective action of N=4 super Yang-Mills theories using harmonic superspace and background field methods, highlighting the structure of leading corrections.

Contribution

It introduces a harmonic superspace approach and applies N=2 background field method to analyze the effective action in broken N=4 SYM.

Findings

Effective action structure is characterized for broken N=4 SYM.

Harmonic superspace simplifies the analysis of N=4 SYM.

Leading low-energy corrections are systematically described.

Abstract

We review a recent progress in constructing low-energy effective action in N=4 super Yang-Mills theories. Using harmonic superspace approach we consider N=4 SYM in terms of unconstrained N=2 superfield and apply N=2 background field method to finding effective action for N=4 SU(n) SYM broken down to U(n)$^{n-1}$. General structure of leading low-energy corrections to effective action is discussed.