Superfield Noether Procedure

TL;DR

This paper develops a superspace Noether procedure for 4D supersymmetric theories with off-shell formulations, enabling compact derivations of supercurrents, central charges, and superconformal Ward identities, with connections to supergravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel superspace Noether procedure that simplifies deriving supercurrents and related quantities in supersymmetric theories with off-shell formulations.

Findings

Derived supercurrents using the new formalism.

Computed central charges for various effective actions.

Provided a simple derivation of the anomalous superconformal Ward-identity.

Abstract

We develop a superspace Noether procedure for supersymmetric field theories in 4-dimensions for which an off-shell formulation in ordinary superspace exists. In this way we obtain an elegant and compact derivation of the various supercurrents in these theories. We then apply this formalism to compute the central charges for a variety of effective actions. As a by-product we also obtain a simple derivation of the anomalous superconformal Ward-identity in N=2 Yang-Mills theory. The connection with linearized supergravity is also discussed.