Phases of Two Adjoints QCD${}_3$ And a Duality Chain

Abstract

We analyze the 2+1 dimensional gauge theory with two fermions in the real adjoint representation with non-zero Chern-Simons level. We propose a new fermion-fermion dualities between strongly-coupled theories and determine the quantum phase using the structure of a `Duality Chain'. We argue that when Chern-Simons level is sufficiently small, the theory in general develops a strongly coupled quantum phase described by an emergent topological field theory. For special cases, our proposal predicts an interesting dynamical scenario with spontaneous breaking of partial 1-form or 0-form global symmetry. It turns out that $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ transformation and the generalized level/rank duality are crucial for the unitary group case. We further unveil the dynamics of the 2+1 dimensional gauge theory with any pair of adjoint/rank-two fermions or two bifundamental fermions using similar `Duality Chain'.

43 pages