Supersymmetry on curved spaces and superconformal anomalies

Abstract

We study the consequences of unbroken rigid supersymmetry of four-dimensional field theories placed on curved manifolds. We show that in Lorentzian signature the background vector field coupling to the R-current is determined by the Weyl tensor of the background metric. In Euclidean signature, the same holds if two supercharges of opposite R-charge are preserved, otherwise the (anti-)self-dual part of the vector field-strength is fixed by the Weyl tensor. As a result of this relation, the trace and R-current anomalies of superconformal field theories simplify, with the trace anomaly becoming purely topological. In particular, in Lorentzian signature, or in the presence of two Euclidean supercharges of opposite R-charge, supersymmetry of the background implies that the term proportional to the central charge c vanishes, both in the trace and R-current anomalies. This is equivalent to the vanishing of a superspace Weyl invariant. We comment on the implications of our results for holography.

33 pages; v2: minor changes, references added; v3: typos corrected, minor improvements; v4: equations (5.9) and (5.10) of v3 corrected

References in corpus (3)

• From Linear SUSY to Constrained Superfields
• Spontaneous Breaking of Conformal Invariance and Trace Anomaly Matching
• Gauged supergravity from type IIB string theory on Y^{p,q} manifolds

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