Low-Energy Dynamics of Supersymmetric Solitons

Abstract

In bosonic field theories the low-energy scattering of solitons that saturate Bogomol'nyi-type bounds can be approximated as geodesic motion on the moduli space of static solutions. In this paper we consider the analogous issue within the context of supersymmetric field theories. We focus our study on a class of $N=2$ non-linear sigma models in $d=2+1$ based on an arbitrary Kähler target manifold and their associated soliton or ``lump" solutions. Using a collective co-ordinate expansion, we construct an effective action which, upon quantisation, describes the low-energy dynamics of the lumps. The effective action is an $N=2$ supersymmetric quantum mechanics action with the target manifold being the moduli space of static charge $N$ lump solutions of the sigma model. The Hilbert space of states of the effective theory consists of anti-holomorphic forms on the moduli space. The normalisable elements of the dolbeault cohomology classes $H^{(0,p)}$ of the moduli space correspond to zero energy bound states and we argue that such states correpond to bound states in the full quantum field theory of the sigma model.