Comparison of Some Exact and Perturbative Results for a Supersymmetric SU(N_c) Gauge Theory

We consider vectorial, asymptotically free ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric SU($N_c$) gauge theories with $N_f$ copies of massless chiral super fields in various representations and study how perturbative predictions for the lower boundary of the infrared conformal phase, as a function of $N_f$, compare with exact results. We make use of two-loop and three-loop calculations of the beta function and anomalous dimension of the quadratic chiral super field operator product for this purpose. The specific chiral superfield contents that we consider are $N_f$ copies of (i) $F+\bar F$, (ii) $Adj$, (iii) $S_2+\bar S_2$, and (iv) $A_2 + \bar A_2$, where $F$, $Adj$, $S_2$, and $A_2$ denote, respectively, the fundamental, adjoint, and symmetric and antisymmetric rank-2 tensor representations. We find that perturbative results slightly overestimate the value of $N_{f,cr}$ relative to the respective exact results for these representations, i.e., slightly underestimate the interval in $N_f$ for which the theory has infrared conformal behavior. Our results provide a measure of how closely perturbative calculations reproduce exact results for these theories.