Supersymmetry breaking deformations and phase transitions in five dimensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates supersymmetry breaking deformations in five-dimensional theories, revealing phase transitions and symmetry breaking phenomena using geometric brane-web techniques, with implications for understanding strong coupling behavior.

Contribution

It provides an explicit geometric construction of supersymmetry breaking deformations in 5D, analyzing phase transitions and symmetry breaking at strong coupling.

Findings

Global symmetry is spontaneously broken at large gauge coupling.

A phase transition separates the Yang-Mills and symmetry-broken phases.

The phase transition can be first or second order depending on the potential structure.

Abstract

We analyze a recently proposed supersymmetry breaking mass deformation of the $E_1$ superconformal fixed point in five dimensions which, at weak gauge coupling, leads to pure $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills and which was conjectured to lead to an interacting CFT at strong coupling. We provide an explicit geometric construction of the deformation using brane-web techniques and show that for large enough gauge coupling a global symmetry is spontaneously broken and the theory enters a new phase which, at infinite coupling, displays an instability. The Yang-Mills and the symmetry broken phases are separated by a phase transition. Depending on the structure of the potential, this can be first or second order.