On supertwistors, the Penrose-Ward transform and N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory

Alexander D Popov, Christian Saemann

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

28 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

It was recently shown by Witten that B-type open topological string theory with the supertwistor space CP^{3|4} as a target space is equivalent to holomorphic Chern-Simons (hCS) theory on the same space. This hCS theory in turn is equivalent to self-dual N=4 super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory in four dimensions. We review the supertwistor description of self-dual and anti-self-dual N-extended SYM theory as the integrability of super Yang-Mills fields on complex (2|N)-dimensional superplanes and demonstrate the equivalence of this description to Witten's formulation. The equivalence of the field equations of hCS theory on an open subset of CP^{3|N} to the field equations of self-dual N-extended SYM theory in four dimensions is made explicit. Furthermore, we extend the picture to the full N=4 SYM theory and, by using the known supertwistor description of this case, we show that the corresponding constraint equations are (gauge) equivalent to the field equations of hCS theory on a quadric in CP^{3|3}xCP^{3|3}.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)931-998
Number of pages68
JournalAdvances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
Volume9
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2005

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