Seminar held by Camillo Imbimbo (University of Genova)

"Superconformal anomalies from superconformal Chern-Simons polynomials"

Abstract: We show that the 4-dimensional superconformal a-anomaly can be derived from the Chern-Simons polynomial associated to the unique cubic invariant of the 4-dimensional N=1 superconformal algebra. This provides a topological "5-dimensional" understanding of the (super)conformal anomaly which mirrors the well-known Chern-Simons formulation of bosonic Yang-Mills and gravitational anomalies. We briefly discuss the possibility that the superconformal c-anomaly also admits a similar Chern-Simons formulation.