Relaxed super self-duality and image SYM at two loops Original Research Article

A closed-form expression is obtained for a holomorphic sector of the two-loop low-energy effective action for the image super Yang–Mills theory on its Coulomb branch where the gauge group image is spontaneously broken to image and the dynamics is described by a single Abelian image vector multiplet. In the framework of the background-field method, this holomorphic sector is singled out by computing the effective action for a background image vector multiplet satisfying a relaxed super self-duality condition. At the two-loop level, the image SYM effective action is shown to possess no image term (with F the image field strength), in accordance with the Dine–Seiberg non-renormalization conjecture and its generalized form given in . An unexpected outcome of our calculation is that no (manifestly supersymmetric invariant generating) image quantum correction occurs at two loops. This is in conflict with previous results.