Supersymmetric non-Abelian gauge models; the exact β-function from one loop of perturbation theory

A method for calculating the exact β-function (in all orders in the coupling constant), proposed earlier in supersymmetric electrodynamics, is generalized. The starting point is the observation that the low-energy effective action is exhausted by one loop, provided that the theory is supersymmetrically regularized both in the ultraviolet and in the infrared region in four dimensions. For the ultraviolet regularization the Pauli-Villars method is used, while for the infrared regularization two variants are considered. The first: quantization in a box of finite volume L3: is universally applicable to any gauge theory. The second variant is based on an effective Higgs mechanism for generation of mass, and requires the presence of certain matter superfields in the Lagrangian. For the second method a necessary condition is the existence of flat directions: so-called valleys along which the energy of the vacuum vanishes. We quantize the field near a nonzero value of the scalar field from the bottom of the valley. After calculation of the one-loop effective action both variants give for the β-function the same exact expression which, in addition, coincides with our previous result extracted from instanton calculus. A few remarks on the problem of anomalies in supersymmetric gauge theories are presented