Chern-Simons and RG flows: contact with dualities

Abstract

Contact terms in two point functions of global symmetry currents have recently been proposed as a check of Seiberg-like duality in three dimensional supersymmetric field theories. In this paper we compute the contact terms for various N = 2 dual pairs in flat space. We show that the results of this computation agree with the ones obtained from localization. We study dual pairs of gauge theories with (anti-)fundamental matter fields, and some special examples of dual pairs with adjoint and antisymmetric matter fields. We also propose a duality between unitary and symplectic gauge theories.