Electron mass anomalous dimension at $O(1/N_f^2)$ in three-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric QED

Abstract: We consider massless three-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics (QED) with $N_f$ flavours of electrons. Within the dimensional reduction scheme, we compute the critical exponents corresponding to both the electron and selectron field and (parity-even) mass anomalous dimensions at the next-to-leading order in the $1/N_f$ expansion and in an arbitrary covariant gauge. The equality of the gauge-invariant mass anomalous dimensions of the electron and the selectron is found to result from a subtle role played by the epsilon-scalars. Our general framework also allows us to compute the critical exponents of pure scalar QED and to recover known results in the case of spinor QED. An application of our results to dynamical (s)electron mass generation is considered. We find evidence that, while dynamical flavor symmetry breaking occurs in spinor QED, both pure scalar QED and supersymmetric QED remain in an interacting conformal phase.