N=2super Yang-Mills action as a Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin term, topological Yang-Mills action, and instantons

Abstract

By constructing a nilpotent extended Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) operator $\overline{s}$ that involves the $N=2$ global supersymmetry transformations of one chirality, we show that the standard $N=2$ off-shell super Yang-Mills action can be represented as an exact BRST term $\overline{s}\ensuremath{\Psi},$ if the gauge fermion $\ensuremath{\Psi}$ is allowed to depend on the inverse powers of supersymmetry (SUSY) ghosts. By using this nonanalytical structure of the gauge fermion (via inverse powers of supersymmetry ghosts), we give field redefinitions in terms of composite fields of SUSY ghosts and $N=2$ fields and we show that Witten's topological Yang-Mills (TYM) theory can be obtained from the ordinary Euclidean $N=2$ super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory directly by using such field redefinitions. In other words, TYM theory is obtained as a change of variables (without twisting). As a consequence it is found that physical and topological interpretations of $N=2$ SYM theory are intertwined together due to the requirement of analyticity of global SUSY ghosts. Moreover, after an instanton-inspired truncation of the model is used, we show that the given field redefinitions yield the Baulieu-Singer formulation of topological Yang-Mills theory.