New results for the quantum supersymmetric kink

We review our work on computations of the quantum corrections to the mass and the central charge of the susy kink. For the mass corrections, we find that the widely used momentum cut-off scheme gives an incorrect result, but we deduce through smoothing of the cut-off an extra term in the mass formula, which produces the correct result. We discover the importance of boundary effects for the mode number cut-off regularization scheme. We introduce the notion of delocalized boundary energy. We discuss two discrete Z2 symmetries and their importance to the mode number approach. For the central charge corrections, we use momentum cut-off regularization with two cut-offs, one for propagators and another for Dirac delta functions. We then compute the quantum anomaly in the central charge, and find that it restores the BPS bound at the one-loop level if the two cut-offs are equal. Talk at the E. S. Fradkin Memorial Conference, June 2000 e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected]