"Induced" N=4 conformal supergravity

Abstract

We consider an abelian N=4 super Yang-Mills theory coupled to background N=4 conformal supergravity fields. At the classical level, this coupling is invariant under global SU(1,1) transformation of the complex ("dilaton-axion") supergravity scalar combined with an on-shell vector-vector duality. We compute the divergent part of the corresponding quantum effective action found by integrating over the super Yang-Mills fields and demonstrate its SU(1,1) invariance. This divergent part related to the conformal anomaly is one-loop exact and should be given by the N=4 conformal supergravity action containing the Weyl tensor squared term. This allows us to determine the full non-linear form of the bosonic part of the N=4 conformal supergravity action which has manifest SU(1,1) invariance.