Chiral gauge dynamics and dynamical supersymmetry breaking

TL;DR

This paper investigates chiral SU(2) gauge theories and their supersymmetric versions, revealing new confinement mechanisms, analyzing their behavior on different spacetime manifolds, and clarifying the origin of superpotentials and topological excitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel confinement mechanism via magnetic quintets and provides a microscopic understanding of superpotentials and flux operators in supersymmetric gauge theories.

Findings

Discovery of a new confinement mechanism involving magnetic quintets.

Evidence that the supersymmetric theory remains conformal and unbroken at large S^1.

Clarification of the origin of flux operators as magnetic bions.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a chiral SU(2) gauge theory with a Weyl fermion in the I=3/2 representation and of its supersymmetric generalization. In the former, we find a new and exotic mechanism of confinement, induced by topological excitations that we refer to as magnetic quintets. The supersymmetric version was examined earlier in the context of dynamical supersymmetry breaking by Intriligator, Seiberg, and Shenker, who showed that if this gauge theory confines at the origin of moduli space, one may break supersymmetry by adding a tree level superpotential. We examine the dynamics by deforming the theory on S^1 x R^3, and show that the infrared behavior of this theory is an interacting CFT at small S^1. We argue that this continues to hold at large S^1, and if so, that supersymmetry must remain unbroken. Our methods also provide the microscopic origin of various superpotentials in SQCD on S^1 x R^3 - which were previously obtained by using symmetry and holomorphy - and resolve a long standing interpretational puzzle concerning a flux operator discovered by Affleck, Harvey, and Witten. It is generated by a topological excitation, a "magnetic bion", whose stability is due to fermion pair exchange between its constituents. We also briefly comment on composite monopole operators as leading effects in two dimensional anti-ferromagnets.