Partially quenched chiral perturbation theory and the replica method - art. no. 054509

We describe a novel framework for partially quenched chiral perturbation th eory based on the replica method. The computational rules are exceedingly s imple. We illustrate these rules by computing the partially quenched chiral condensate to one-loop order. By considering arbitrary chiral ii-point fun ctions we show explicitly to one-loop order the equivalence between this me thod and the one based on supersymmetry. It is possible to go smoothly from the conventional replica method to a supersymmetric variant by choosing th e number of valence quarks to be negative.