Corpuscular Breaking of Supersymmetry

Abstract

Are topological solitons elementary or composites? We answer this question by drawing up a corpuscular formalism in which solitons are coherent states of quantum constituents. This naturally leads to a functional integral representation, in which the classical saddle point is reached as the most probable distribution of corpuscles in the $\hbar = 0$ limit and where quantum corpuscular corrections correspond to excursions away from such a distribution that occur only for finite $\hbar$. Several striking features come up. Topological charge emerges as a collective flow of quantum numbers carried by individual corpuscles. Moreover, the corpuscular corrections are not reducible to any known form of quantum corrections, such as loop expansions in the coupling constant $\hbar g^2$ or semiclassical $e^{-1/\hbar g^2}$ effects. Corpuscular corrections are stronger and appear already at order $\sqrt{\hbar g^2}$. In SUSY theories quantum corpuscular corrections generically break supersymmetry. We show that a domain wall which perturbatively is a BPS state, violates all supersymmetries when the corpuscular effects are taken into account. The extension of the corpuscular structure to $D$-branes can lead to a built-in supersymmetry breaking mechanism in string theory, insensitive to technicalities such as moduli stabilization, with the SUSY breaking scale set by the string coupling times the $D$-brane tension.