Monopole Condensation, And Confinement In N=2 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory

TL;DR

This paper explores the vacuum structure and dyon spectrum of N=2 supersymmetric SU(2) gauge theory, revealing how monopole condensation leads to confinement through electric-magnetic duality and exact formulas for particle masses.

Contribution

It provides a precise, exact analysis of the vacuum and dyon spectrum in N=2 supersymmetric gauge theory, highlighting monopole condensation as a mechanism for confinement.

Findings

Exact formulas for electron and dyon masses

Identification of monopole condensation as confinement mechanism

Description of electric-magnetic duality in the theory

Abstract

We study the vacuum structure and dyon spectrum of N=2 supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions, with gauge group SU(2). The theory turns out to have remarkably rich and physical properties which can nonetheless be described precisely; exact formulas can be obtained, for instance, for electron and dyon masses and the metric on the moduli space of vacua. The description involves a version of Olive-Montonen electric-magnetic duality. The ``strongly coupled'' vacuum turns out to be a weakly coupled theory of monopoles, and with a suitable perturbation confinement is described by monopole condensation.