Harmonic Superspace in Bloomington, MN

Here is the first pedagogical introduction to harmonic superspace in extended supersymmetry by the scientists who developed the method. Inspired by developments in superstring theory, it provides a systematic treatment of the quantum field theories with N=2 and N=3 supersymmetry in Harmonic Superspace. The authors present the harmonic superspace approach as a means of providing an off-shell description of the N=2 supersymmetric theories, both at the classical and quantum levels. Furthermore, they show how it offers a unique way to construct an off-shell formulation of a theory with higher supersymmetry, namely, the N=3 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. Harmonic Superspace makes manifest many remarkable geometric properties of the N=2 theories, for example, the one-to-one correspondence between N=2 supersymmetric matter, and hyper-Kähler and quaternionic manifolds.