Supersymmetric Discrete Light-cone Quantization Research Articles

Antiperiodic boundary conditions in supersymmetric discrete light cone quantization

It is of considerable importance to have a numerical method for solving supersymmetric theories that can support a non-zero central charge. The central charge in supersymmetric theories is in general a boundary integral and therefore vanishes when one uses periodic boundary conditions. One is therefore prevented from studying BPS states in the standard supersymmetric formulation of DLCQ (SDLCQ). We present a novel formulation of SDLCQ where the fields satisfy anti-periodic boundary conditions. The Hamiltonian is written as the anti-commutator of two charges, as in SDLCQ. The anti-periodic SDLCQ we consider breaks supersymmetry at finite resolution, but requires no renormalization and becomes supersymmetric in the continuum limit. In principle, this method could be used to study BPS states. However, we find its convergence to be disappointingly slow.

Towards a SDLCQ test of the Maldacena conjecture

We consider the Maldacena conjecture applied to the near horizon geometry of a D1-brane in the supergravity approximation and present numerical results of a test of the conjecture against the boundary field theory calculation using DLCQ. We previously calculated the two-point function of the stress-energy tensor on the supergravity side; the methods of Gubser, Klebanov, Polyakov, and Witten were used. On the field theory side, we derived an explicit expression for the two-point function in terms of data that may be extracted from the supersymmetric discrete light cone quantization (SDLCQ) calculation at a given harmonic resolution. This yielded a well defined numerical algorithm for computing the two-point function. For the supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with 16 supercharges that arises in the Maldacena conjecture, the algorithm is perfectly well defined; however, the size of the numerical computation prevented us from obtaining a numerical check of the conjecture. We now present numerical results with approximately 1000 times as many states as we previously considered. These results support the Maldacena conjecture and are within 10–15% of the predicted numerical results in some regions. Our results are still not sufficient to demonstrate convergence, and, therefore, cannot be considered to a numerical proof of the conjecture. We present a method for using a “flavor” symmetry to greatly reduce the size of the basis and discuss a numerical method that we use which is particularly well suited for this type of matrix element calculation.