Speaker
Description
Recently, various authors have studied the vacua of strongly coupled field theories via the introduction of anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) to supersymmetric (SUSY) gauge theories. SUSY gauge theories are more tractable than their non-SUSY counterparts, and AMSB allows one to retain a level of analytic control over the theory even as SUSY is broken. It is thus an alluring tool to study non-SUSY vacua. However, it is known that in at least some cases, there is a phase transition as the SUSY-breaking scale crosses the confinement scale. It is therefore unclear to what extent these types of calculations accurately portray realistic non-SUSY physics.
We introduce AMSB to $\mathcal{N}=2$ SQCD with massless squarks. In the UV, we find that the resulting theories retain $\mathcal{N}=1$ SUSY for all $SU(N)$ gauge groups. This provides an opportunity to study the robustness of AMSB itself. We have a much better understanding of $\mathcal{N}=1$ SQCD than we do its non-SUSY counterpart, allowing us to compare the vacua associated to different scales of SUSY-breaking.
Specializing to $SU(2)$, we calculate the SUSY breaking effects in the IR. The surviving vacua exhibit monopole condensation and confinement as in the famed 1994 Seiberg-Witten papers. This result provides tentative support to the validity of a recent attempt by Murayama to derive the vacuum structure of massless QCD using AMSB.
Our calculations in some sense determine the leading low-energy running of the fundamental gauge coupling, deep in the nonperturbative regime. We heuristically argue that this running can be interpreted as a statement about Wilson loops - namely, that they follow an area law.
| Keyword-1 | Gauge theory |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | SUSY breaking |
| Keyword-3 | Confinement |