Strong anomaly and phases of chiral gauge theories

Abstract

We present a simple argument which seems to favor, when applied to a large class of strongly-coupled chiral gauge theories, a dynamical-Higgs-phase scenario, characterized by certain bifermion condensates. Flavor symmetric confining vacua described in the infrared by a set of baryonlike massless composite fermions saturating the conventional 't Hooft anomaly matching equations, appear instead disfavored. Our basic criterion is that it should be possible to write a strong-anomaly effective action, analogous to the one used in QCD to describe the solution of the $U(1{)}_A$ problem in the low-energy effective action, by using the low-energy degrees of freedom in the hypothesized infrared theory. We also comment on some well-known ideas such as the complementarity and the large $N$ planar dominance in the context of these chiral gauge theories.Some striking analogies and contrasts between the massless QCD and chiral gauge theories seem to emerge from this discussion.

43 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Lattice super-Yang-Mills using domain wall fermions in the chiral limit
• On Yang-Mills Theories with Chiral Matter at Strong Coupling
• 't Hooft anomaly matching condition and chiral symmetry breaking without bilinear condensate
• Probing the dynamics of chiral SU(N) gauge theories via generalized anomalies
• Monte-Carlo simulations of overlap Majorana fermions

Cited by in corpus (8)

• New Anomalies, TQFTs, and Confinement in Bosonic Chiral Gauge Theories
• Chiral Gauge Dynamics: Candidates for Non-Supersymmetric Dualities
• Dynamical Abelianization and anomalies in chiral gauge theories
• Anomalies for anomalous symmetries
• Phase structure of linear quiver gauge theories from anomaly matching
• Dynamical symmetry breaking in Georgi-Glashow chiral-gauge theories
• Generalized symmetry constraints on deformed 4d (S)CFTs
• Baryons, Skyrmions and $\theta$-periodicity anomaly in chiral and vector-like gauge theories