Quite a Character: The Spectrum of Yang-Mills on S^3

Abstract

We introduce a simple method to extract the representation content of the spectrum of a system with SU(2) symmetry from its partition function. The method is easily generalized to systems with SO(2,4) symmetry, such as conformal field theories in four dimensions. As a specific application we obtain an explicit generating function for the representation content of free planar Yang-Mills theory on S^3. The extension to N = 4 super Yang-Mills is also discussed.