Infrared divergences and a non-local gauge for superspace Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

The usual superspace approach to supersymmetric gauge theories suffers from problems with infrared divergences which greatly complicate multiloop calculations. We eliminate these divergences by introducing a non-local gauge-fixing term. In the background field method this term leads to unusual quantum-background interactions. Functional methods are presented for dealing with these interactions. As an example we compute the two-loop Yang-Mills β-function using the background field method in superspace. We also show how a non-local gauge can be used in ordinary, non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory.