Massless monopole clouds and electric-magnetic duality

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality between massless monopole clouds and non-Abelian gauge theories, proposing that these clouds are dual to infrared radiation and may relate to confinement phenomena in QCD-like theories.

Contribution

It introduces a duality framework for massless monopole clouds in supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories and discusses their potential role in confinement through non-Abelian dual Meissner effects.

Findings

Massless monopole clouds can be identified as duals of infrared radiation.

Non-Abelian clouds tend to condense and screen charges after supersymmetry breaking.

The dual non-Abelian states may persist at QCD scales, relating to confinement mechanisms.

Abstract

We discuss the Montonen-Olive electric-magnetic duality for the BPS massless monopole clouds in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with non-Abelian unbroken gauge symmetries. We argue that these low energy non-Abelian clouds can be identified as the duals of the infrared bremsstrahlung radiation of the non-Abelian massless particles. After we break the N=4 supersymmetry to N=1 by adding a superpotential, or to N=0 by further adding soft breaking terms, these non-Abelian clouds will generally condense and screen the non-Abelian charges of the massive monopole probes. The effective mass of these dual non-Abelian states is likely to persist as we lower the energy to the QCD scale, if all the non-Abelian Higgs particles are massive. This can be regarded as a manifestation of the non-Abelian dual Meissner effect above the QCD scale, and we expect it to continuously connect with the confinement as we lower the supersymmetry breaking scale to the QCD scale.