Supersymmetric Ward Identities and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in SUSY QED

We present some of the supersymmetric Ward identities restricting the three-point vertices of supersymmetric QED, and the most general form of the vertices capable of satisfying both these and the Ward-Takahashi identities, and use these vertices to analyze the Dyson-Schwinger equation in the component formalism. We find that there is no value for the gauge parameter that forces quantum corrections to the effective mass to vanish, in contrast to previous results in the superfield formalism. We argue that the nonrenormalisation theorem forbidding mass generation in supersymmetric QED is an artifact of combining a non-gauge covariant truncation of the supersymmetric Dyson-Schwinger equation with a gauge-dependent argument although we concede that we have not yet succeeded in finding a massive solution to the equations.