Study of the renormalization-group evolution of N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories using Padé approximants

We study asymptotically free SU(Nc) gauge theories with N=1 supersymmetry, including the purely gluonic theory and theories with Nf copies of a pair of massless chiral superfields in the respective representations R and R¯ of SU(Nc). The cases in which R is the fundamental representation and the symmetric and antisymmetric rank-2 tensor representation are considered. We calculate Padé approximants to the beta functions for these theories in the DR¯ scheme up to four-loop order for the gluonic theory and up to three-loop order for the theories with matter superfields and compare results for IR zeros and poles with results from the NSVZ beta function. Our calculations provide a quantitative measure, for these theories, of how well finite-order perturbative results calculated in one scheme reproduce properties of a known beta function calculated in a different scheme.