4D $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs and spin chains

Abstract

This is the writeup of the lectures given at the Winter School "YRISW 2018" to appear in a special issue of JPhysA. In the first part of these lecture notes we review some important facts about 4D $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs. We begin with basic textbook material, the supersymmetry algebra and its massless representations and the construction of Lagrangians using superspace. Then we turn to more modern topics, the study of the $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCA and its representation theory. Our intention is to understand how much we can learn from representation theory alone, even about the dynamics of $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs. In the second part of the notes we use these tools to construct spin chains for $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs, the spectral problem of which computes anomalous dimensions of local operators. We discuss their novel features comparing them with their counterparts in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM and search for possible integrability structures that emerge.