We analyse the relation between anomalies in their manifestly supersymmetric formulation in superspace and their formulation in Wess-Zumino (WZ) gauges. We show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the solutions of the cohomology problem in the two formulations and that they are related by a particular choice of a superspace counterterm (scheme). Any apparent violation of $Q$-supersymmetry is due to an explicit violation by the counterterm which defines the scheme equivalent to the WZ gauge. It is therefore removable.
The relation between the trace and R-current anomalies in supersymmetric theories implies that the U$(1)_RF^2$, U$(1)_R$ and U$(1)_R^3$ anomalies which are matched in studies of N=1 Seiberg duality satisfy positivity constraints. Some constraints are
rigorous and others conjectured as four-dimensional generalizations of the Zamolodchikov $c$-theorem. These constraints are tested in a large number of N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories in the non-Abelian Coulomb phase, and they are satisfied in all renormalizable models with unique anomaly-free R-current, including those with accidental symmetry. Most striking is the fact that the flow of the Euler anomaly coefficient, $a_{UV}-a_{IR}$, is always positive, as conjectured by Cardy.
In this paper, we discuss the chiral anomaly in a Lorentz-breaking extension of QED which, besides the common terms that are present in the Standard Model Extension, includes some dimension-five nonminimal couplings. We find, using the Fujikawa forma
lism, that these nonminimal couplings induce new terms in the anomaly which depend on the Lorentz-violating parameters. Perturbative calculations are also carried out in order to investigate whether or not new ambiguous Carroll-Field-Jackiw terms are induced in the effective action.
We discuss the holographic description of Narain $U(1)^ctimes U(1)^c$ conformal field theories, and their potential similarity to conventional weakly coupled gravity in the bulk, in the sense that the effective IR bulk description includes $U(1)$ gra
vity amended with additional light degrees of freedom. Starting from this picture, we formulate the hypothesis that in the large central charge limit the density of states of any Narain theory is bounded by below by the density of states of $U(1)$ gravity. This immediately implies that the maximal value of the spectral gap for primary fields is $Delta_1=c/(2pi e)$. To test the self-consistency of this proposal, we study its implications using chiral lattice CFTs and CFTs based on quantum stabilizer codes. First we notice that the conjecture yields a new bound on quantum stabilizer codes, which is compatible with previously known bounds in the literature. We proceed to discuss the variance of the density of states, which for consistency must be vanishingly small in the large-$c$ limit. We consider ensembles of code and chiral theories and show that in both cases the density variance is exponentially small in the central charge.
We study N=1 supersymmetric SU(2) gauge theory in four dimensions with a large number of massless quarks. We argue that effective superpotentials as a function of local gauge-invariant chiral fields should exist for these theories. We show that altho
ugh the superpotentials are singular, they nevertheless correctly describe the moduli space of vacua, are consistent under RG flow to fewer flavors upon turning on masses, and also reproduce by a tree-level calculation the higher-derivative F-terms calculated by Beasely and Witten (hep-th/0409149) using instanton methods. We note that this phenomenon can also occur in supersymmetric gauge theories in various dimensions.
We revisit the double copy description for linearized gravity and point out various technical issues and subtleties, associated with setting up the double copy description, including the problem of matching degrees of freedom on both sides of the dou
ble copy dictionary and the related issue of the constraint between graviton and dilaton sources. We introduce and discuss possible resolutions of these issues.