Mass perturbations in twisted N=4 supersymmetric gauge theories

Mass perturbations of the twisted N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theory considered by Vafa and Witten to test S-duality are studied for the case of Kahler four-manifolds. It is shown that the resulting mass-perturbed theory can be regarded as an equivariant extension associated to a U(1) symmetry of the twisted theory, which is only present for Kahler manifolds. In addition, it is shown that the partition function, the only topological invariant of the theory, remains invariant under the perturbation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.