Aspects of Twistor Geometry and Supersymmetric Field Theories within Superstring Theory

Abstract

In this thesis, we report on results in non-anticommutative field theory and twistor string theory, trying to be self-contained. We first review the construction of non-anticommutative N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and discuss a Drinfeld-twist which allows to regain a twisted supersymmetry in the non-anticommutative setting. This symmetry then leads to twisted chiral rings and supersymmetric Ward-Takahashi identities, which, when combined with the usual naturalness argument by Seiberg, could yield non-renormalization theorems for non-anticommutative field theories. The major part of this thesis consists of a discussion of various geometric aspects of the Penrose-Ward transform. We present in detail the case of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and its self-dual truncation. Furthermore, we study reductions of the supertwistor space to exotic supermanifolds having even nilpotent dimensions as well as dimensional reductions to mini-supertwistor and mini-superambitwistor spaces. Eventually, we present two pairs of matrix models in the context of twistor string theory, and find a relation between the ADHM- and Nahm-constructions and topological D-brane configurations.