Non-Supersymmetric Seiberg Duality, Orientifold QCD and Non-Critical Strings

TL;DR

This paper proposes a non-supersymmetric electric-magnetic duality for certain gauge theories, supported by string theory embeddings, anomaly matching, and conjectures an exact conformal window, extending ideas from supersymmetric dualities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-supersymmetric duality for U(N_c) gauge theories with specific matter content and provides a string theory framework supporting this duality.

Findings

Duality exchanges N_c with N_f - N_c  4, leaving N_f invariant.

Matching global anomalies between dual theories.

Supports duality via boundary and crosscap state monodromies in non-critical string theory.

Abstract

We propose an electric-magnetic duality and conjecture an exact conformal window for a class of non-supersymmetric U(N_c) gauge theories with fermions in the (anti)symmetric representation of the gauge group and N_f additional scalar and fermion flavors. The duality exchanges N_c with N_f -N_c \mp 4 leaving N_f invariant, and has common features with Seiberg duality in N=1 SQCD with SU or SO/Sp gauge group. At large N the duality holds due to planar equivalence with N=1 SQCD. At finite N we embed these gauge theories in a setup with D-branes and orientifolds in a non-supersymmetric, but tachyon-free, non-critical type 0B string theory and argue in favor of the duality in terms of boundary and crosscap state monodromies as in analogous supersymmetric situations. One can verify explicitly that the resulting duals have matching global anomalies. Finally, we comment on the moduli space of these gauge theories and discuss other potential non-supersymmetric examples that could exhibit similar dualities.