Instanton effects and linear-chiral duality

TL;DR

This paper investigates the duality between linear and chiral dilaton formulations in super-Yang-Mills theories, emphasizing explicit instanton calculations and their implications for axion potentials and dilaton stabilization.

Contribution

It provides a direct instanton-based analysis of duality without auxiliary fields and explores the effects on axion potential symmetries and stabilization mechanisms.

Findings

Duality is consistent with explicit instanton calculations.

Symmetries of the axion potential translate into equations of motion symmetries.

Dijkgraaf-Vafa corrections can stabilize the axion in single condensate scenarios.

Abstract

We discuss duality between the linear and chiral dilaton formulations, in the presence of super-Yang-Mills instanton corrections to the effective action. In contrast to previous work on the subject, our approach appeals directly to explicit instanton calculations and does not rely on the introduction of an auxiliary Veneziano-Yankielowicz superfield. We discuss duality in the case of an axion that has a periodic scalar potential, and find that the bosonic fields of the dual linear multiplet have a modified interpretation. We note that symmetries of the axion potential manifest themselves as symmetries of the equations of motion for the linear multiplet. We also make some brief remarks regarding dilaton stabilization. We point out that corrections recently studied by Dijkgraaf and Vafa can be used to stabilize the axion in the case of a single super-Yang-Mills condensate.