Studies of low-energy effective actions in supersymmetric field theories

Understand

This thesis examines low-energy effective actions of supersymmetric quantum field theories.

• These actions contain information about the low-energy field content and dynamics of quantum field theories and are essential for understanding their phenomenological and theoretical properties.
• In chapters 2 to 5, the covariant background field method is used to investigate quantum corrections to sectors of a variety of supersymmetric field theories at 1 and 2 loops.
• We start by looking at the background field quantisation of a general N=1 super-Yang-Mills theory, rederiving the well-known 1 loop finiteness conditions.