Effect of quantum fluctuations on topological excitations and central charge in supersymmetric theories

Abstract

The effect of quantum fluctuations on Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS)-saturated topological excitations in supersymmetric theories is studied. Focus is placed on a sequence of topological excitations that derive from the same classical soliton or vortex in lower dimensions and it is shown that their quantum characteristics, such as the spectrum and profile, differ critically with the dimension of spacetime. In all the examples examined the supercharge algebra retains its classical form although short-wavelength fluctuations may modify the operator structure of the central charge, yielding an anomaly. The central charge, on taking the expectation value, is further affected by long-wavelength fluctuations, and this makes the BPS-excitation spectra only approximately calculable in some low-dimensional theories. In four dimensions, in contrast, holomorphy plays a special role in stabilizing the BPS-excitation spectra against quantum corrections. The basic tool in our study is the superfield supercurrent, from which the supercharge algebra with a central extension is extracted in a supersymmetric setting. A general method is developed to determine the associated superconformal anomaly by considering dilatation directly in superspace.