Normalized Vacuum States in N = 4 Supersymmetric Yang--Mills Quantum Mechanics with Any Gauge Group

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and count of normalized vacuum states in N=4 super-Yang-Mills quantum mechanics across various gauge groups, using mass deformation and functional integral methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive calculation of the number of vacuum states for all gauge groups, revealing differences between unitary and other groups, and discusses advanced analytical techniques.

Findings

Unitary groups have exactly one vacuum state.

Non-unitary groups have multiple vacuum states.

The mass deformation method effectively counts vacua across gauge groups.

Abstract

We study the question of existence and the number of normalized vacuum states in N = 4 super-Yang-Mills quantum mechanics for any gauge group. The mass deformation method is the simplest and clearest one. It allowed us to calculate the number of normalized vacuum states for all gauge groups. For all unitary groups, #(vac) = 1, but for the symplectic groups [starting from Sp(6) ], for the orthogonal groups [starting from SO(8)] and for all the exceptional groups, it is greater than one. We also discuss at length the functional integral method. We calculate the ``deficit term'' for some non-unitary groups and predict the value of the integral giving the ``principal contribution''. The issues like the Born-Oppenheimer procedure to derive the effective theory and the manifestation of the localized vacua for the asymptotic effective wave functions are also discussed.