The Chern-Simons Coefficient in Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Chern-Simons Theories

Abstract

We study one-loop correction to the Chern-Simons coefficient $κ=k/4π$ in $N=1,2,3$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills Chern-Simons systems. In the pure bosonic case, the shift of the parameter $k$ is known to be $k\rightarrow k + c_v$, where $c_v$ is the quadratic Casimir of the gauge group. In the $N=1$ case, the fermionic contribution cancels the bosonic contribution by half and the shift is $k \rightarrow k+ c_v/2$, making the theory anomalous if $c_v$ is odd. In the $N=2,3$ cases, the fermionic contribution cancels the bosonic contribution completely and there is no correction. We also calculate the mass corrections, showing the supersymmetry is preserved. As the matter fields decouple from the gauge field in the pure Chern-Simons limit, this work sheds some light on the regularization dependency of the correction in pure Chern-Simons systems. We also discuss the implication to the case when the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken by the Higgs mechanism.