θ-angle monodromy in two dimensions

Abstract

"θ-angle monodromy" occurs when a theory possesses a landscape of metastable vacua which reshuffle as one shifts a periodic coupling θby a single period. "Axion monodromy" models arise when this parameter is promoted to a dynamical pseudoscalar field. This paper studies the phenomenon in two-dimensional gauge theories which possess a U(1) factor at low energies: the massive Schwinger and gauged massive Thirring models, the U(N) 't Hooft model, and the {\mathbb CP}^N model. In all of these models, the energy dependence of a given metastable false vacuum deviates significantly from quadratic dependence on θjust as the branch becomes completely unstable (distinct from some four-dimensional axion monodromy models). In the Schwinger, Thirring, and 't Hooft models, the meson masses decrease as a function of θ. In the U(N) models, the landscape is enriched by sectors with nonabelian θterms. In the {\mathbb CP}^N model, we compute the effective action and the size of the mass gap is computed along a metastable branch.

32 pages total, 27 pages text, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• D7-Brane Moduli Space in Axion Monodromy and Fluxbrane Inflation
• A Monodromy from London
• Lifetimes of (near) eternal false vacua
• Evading the Lyth Bound in Hybrid Natural Inflation
• Quantum Vacua of 2d Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory
• Renormalization of the Nonlinear O(3) Model with Theta-Term
• Real-Time Corrections to the Effective Potential
• Large $\theta$ angle in two-dimensional large $N$ ${\mathbb{CP}}^{N-1}$ model