Dimensional Reduction is Supersymmetric at Three Loops

Abstract

We resolve the long-standing claim that regularisation by dimensional reduction (DR) fails to preserve supersymmetry in Super Yang-Mills (SYM) theories at three loops. Earlier results reported a mismatch between the Yukawa and ghost-gluon $\beta$ functions in $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYM, suggesting a breakdown of supersymmertry. We show that this discrepancy does not originate from DR itself but from subtleties in the treatment of the Clifford algebra. A corrected three-loop calculation restores full supersymmetric behaviour, and we demonstrate that the same issue would first affect $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM only at five loops, consistent with existing four-loop results. Our findings confirm that DR preserves supersymmetry for $\mathcal{N}=1, 2$ and $4$ SYM through the loop orders examined.