Singular SQCD Vacua and Confinement

Abstract

We revisit the study of confining vacua in the softly broken N=2 supersymmetric QCD, in the light of some recent developments in our understanding of the dynamics of N=2 gauge theories. These vacua are characterized by an effective magnetic $SU(r)$ gauge group ($0\le r\le N_f/2$) and are referred to sometimes as the $r$ vacua. We further clarify the meaning of $r\leftrightarrow N_f-r$ duality arising from the matching of semi-classical and quantum vacua. A particular attention is paid to certain singular SCFT's of N=2 SQCD, driven into confinement phase by the adjoint mass deformation $\mu {\Phi }^2$. In some cases they occur as a result of coalescence of different $r$ vacua as the bare mass is tuned to a critical value.

27 pages

References in corpus (8)

• Supersymmetric Solitons and How They Help Us Understand Non-Abelian Gauge Theories
• S-duality in N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories
• Tinkertoys for Gaiotto Duality
• Non-Abelian duality from vortex moduli: a dual model of color-confinement
• Comments on scaling limits of 4d N=2 theories
• Quantum Higgs branches of isolated N=2 superconformal field theories
• Non-Abelian vortex dynamics: Effective world-sheet action
• Singular points in N=2 SQCD

Cited by in corpus (2)

• New Confinement Phases from Singular SCFT
• Modular Invariant Regularization of String Determinants and the Serre GAGA Principle