Published July 21, 2011
| public
Journal Article
What Maxwell theory in d ≠ 4 teaches us about scale and conformal invariance
- Creators
- El-Showk, Sheer
- Nakayama, Yu
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Rychkov, Slava
Abstract
The free Maxwell theory in d ≠ 4 dimensions provides a physical example of a unitary, scale invariant theory which is NOT conformally invariant. The easiest way to see this is that the field strength operator F_(μν) is neither a primary nor a descendant. We show how conformal multiplets can be completed, and conformality restored, by adding new local operators to the theory. In d ≥ 5, this can only be done by sacrificing unitarity of the extended Hilbert space. We analyze the full symmetry structure of the extended theory, which turns out to be related to the OSp(d,2|2) superalgebra.
Additional Information
© 2011 Elsevier B.V. Received 14 February 2011; accepted 11 March 2011. Available online 16 March 2011. S.R. is grateful to Jan Troost, Manuela Kulaxizi and Andrei Parnachev for useful discussions. Y.N. thanks John Cardy for the encouraging and stimulating correspondence on the subject. S.E. would like to thank the CEA Saclay for hospitality during the completion of part of this work. The research of S.E. is partially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under a Rubicon grant. The work of S.R. was supported in part by the European Programme "Unification in the LHC Era", contract PITN-GA-2009-237920 (UNILHC). The work of Y.N. is supported by Sherman Fairchild Fellowship at California Institute of Technology.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 23829
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110531-091938425
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Rubicon Grant
- PITN-GA-2009-237920
- European Programme Unification in the LHC Era (UNILHC)
- Caltech Sherman Fairchild Fellowship
- Created
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2011-05-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Caltech Theory