Instanton calculus, topological field theories and N = 2 Super Yang-Mills theories

Abstract

The results obtained by Seiberg and Witten for N = 2 supersymmetric theories with gauge group SU (2) are in agreement with instanton computations carried out for winding numbers one and two. This suggests that the instanton saddle point saturates the non-perturbative contribution to the functional integral. A natural framework in which corrections to this approximation are absent is given by the topological field theory built out of the N = 2 Super Yang-Mills theory. After extending the standard construction of the Topological Yang-Mills theory to encompass the case of a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value for the scalar field, a BRST transformation is defined (as a supersymmetry plus a gauge variation), which on the instanton moduli space is the exterior derivative. We then show that each non-perturbative contribution to the N = 2 low-energy effective action can be written as the integral of a total derivative of a function of the instanton moduli. Only instanton configurations of zero conformal size contribute to this result.