Almost Conformal Vacua and Confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates the confining vacua in a deformed superconformal SU(3) gauge theory with four flavors, revealing a novel confinement mechanism involving non-Abelian magnetic monopoles and a generalized beta function cancellation.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the low-energy spectrum and confinement mechanism in a specific non-Abelian gauge theory, extending the understanding of non-Abelian monopole dynamics.

Findings

Identification of magnetic monoplet doublets, a dyon doublet, and an electric doublet in the low-energy spectrum.

Discovery of a nontrivial beta function cancellation mechanism generalizing Argyres-Douglas.

Confinement occurs via strongly interacting non-Abelian magnetic monopoles, differing from Abelianized vacua.

Abstract

Dynamics of confining vacua which appear as deformed superconformal theory with a non-Abelian gauge symmetry, is studied by taking a concrete example of the sextet vacua of ${\cal N}=2$, SU(3) gauge theory with $n_f=4$, with equal quark masses. We show that the low-energy "matter" degrees of freedom of this theory consist of four magnetic monopole doublets of the low-energy effective SU(2) gauge group, one dyon doublet, and one electric doublet. We find a mechanism of cancellation of the beta function, which naturally but nontrivially generalizes that of Argyres-Douglas. Study of our SCFT theory as a limit of six colliding ${\cal N}=1$ vacua, suggests that the confinement in the present theory occurs in an essentially different manner from those vacua with dynamical Abelianization, and involves strongly interacting non-Abelian magnetic monopoles.