Exactly Marginal Deformations and Global Symmetries

Understand

We study the problem of finding exactly marginal deformations of N=1 superconformal field theories in four dimensions.

• We find that the only way a marginal chiral operator can become not exactly marginal is for it to combine with a conserved current multiplet.
• Additionally, we find that the space of exactly marginal deformations, also called the "conformal manifold," is the quotient of the space of marginal couplings by the complexified continuous global symmetry group.
• This fact explains why exactly marginal deformations are ubiquitous in N=1 theories.