Nonperturbative tests of the parent/orbifold correspondence in supersymmetric gauge theories

It has been shown that a procedure analogous to orbifolding in string theory, when applied to certain large-N field theories, leaves correlators invariant perturbatively. We test nonperturbative agreement of some aspects of the parent and orbifold theories. More specifically, we find that the holomorphic gauge couplings on the Coulomb branch in the parent and orbifold Seiberg-Witten theories are related, even away from the 't Hooft limit. We also check that any large-N theory which has an infrared conformal fixed point and satisfies certain anomaly positivity constraints required by such theories will continue to satisfy those constraints after orbifolding. We discuss extensions of these results to finite N. (author)