Mass perturbations in twisted N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theories Original Research Article

Mass perturbations of the twisted N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theory considered by Vafa and Witten to test S-duality are studied for the case of Kähler four-manifolds. It is shown that the resulting mass-perturbed theory can be regarded as an equivariant extension associated to a U(1) symmetry of the twisted theory, which is only present for Kähler manifolds. In addition, it is shown that the partition function, the only topological invariant of the theory, remains invariant under the perturbation.