Exactly Marginal Deformations of N=4 SYM and of its Supersymmetric Orbifold Descendants

TL;DR

This paper investigates exactly marginal deformations of N=4 SYM and its orbifold descendants, identifying new N=1 superconformal theories and analyzing their deformation spaces perturbatively and through general arguments.

Contribution

It introduces new families of N=1 superconformal field theories from orbifolds and studies their exactly marginal deformations using both perturbative and theoretical methods.

Findings

Some deformation spaces are smaller than predicted by general analysis.

Perturbative results show non-generic forms at low orders.

New N=1 superconformal theories are identified from orbifolds.

Abstract

In this paper we study exactly marginal deformations of field theories living on D3-branes at low energies. These theories include N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and theories obtained from it via the orbifolding procedure. We restrict ourselves only to orbifolds and deformations which leave some supersymmetry unbroken. A number of new families of N=1 superconformal field theories are found. We analyze the deformations perturbatively, and also by using general arguments for the dimension of the space of exactly marginal deformations. We find some cases where the space of perturbative exactly marginal deformations is smaller than the prediction of the general analysis at least up to three-loop order), and other cases where the perturbative result (at low orders) has a non-generic form.