2008

A counterexample to the a-'theorem'

Shapere, Alfred D., Tachikawa, Yuji

Understand

The conclusion of the original paper was wrong, due to the incorrect assumption that the low-energy limit at the strongly-coupled point consists of a single, coupled SCFT.

  • By taking into account the fact that the low-energy limit consists of multiple decoupled parts, it was later shown in arXiv:1011.4568 that there is no violation of the a-theorem in this system.
  • Furthermore, the a-theorem itself was convincingly demonstrated in arXiv:1107.3987, and the argument presented there has been further refined.
  • The rest of this paper is kept as it was, for some parts of the discussions might still be of interest.

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