Nonperturbative Effective Actions of N=2 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories

We elaborate on our previous work on N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. In particular, we show how to explicitly determine the low energy quantum effective action for G = SU(3) from the underlying hyperelliptic Riemann surface, and calculate the leading instanton corrections. This is done by solving Picard-Fuchs equations and asymptotically evaluating period integrals. We find that the dynamics of the SU(3) theory is governed by an Appell system of type F4, and compute the exact quantum gauge coupling explicitly in terms of Appell functions. CERN-TH/95-104 May 1995 a Work supported in part by GIF the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research