Domain Walls and the $CP$ Anomaly in Softly Broken Supersymmetric QCD

Abstract

In ordinary QCD with light, degenerate, fundamental flavors, $CP$ symmetry is spontaneously broken at $\theta =\pi$, and domain wall solutions connecting the vacua can be constructed in chiral perturbation theory. In some cases the breaking of $CP$ saturates an 't Hooft anomaly, and anomaly inflow requires nontrivial massless excitations on the domain walls. Analogously, $CP$ can be spontaneously broken in supersymmetric QCD with light flavors and small soft breaking parameters. We study $CP$ breaking and domain walls in softly broken SQCD with $N_f<N$ flavors. Relative to ordinary QCD, the supersymmetric case contains an extra light field, the ${\eta }^{\prime }$, which has interesting effects on the structure of the walls. Vanishing of the $CP$ anomaly is associated with the existence of multiple domain wall trajectories through field space, including walls which support no nontrivial massless excitations. In cases with an anomaly such walls are forbidden, and their absence in the relevant SQCD theories can be seen directly from the geometry of the low energy field space. In the case $N_f=N-1$, multiple approximately-BPS walls connect the vacua. Corrections to their tensions can be computed at leading order in the soft breaking parameters, producing a phase diagram for the stable wall trajectory. We also comment on domain walls in the similar case of QCD with an adjoint and fundamental flavors, and on the impact of adding an axion in this theory.

22 pages

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• Mildly Flavoring domain walls in SU(N) SQCD: baryons and monopole superpotentials
• Domain wall moduli in softly-broken SQCD at $\bar{\theta }=\pi$
• Mildly Flavoring Domain Walls in Sp(N) SQCD
• Strong CP from a Hidden Chiral Condensate