Electric-Magnetic Duality in Supersymmetric Non-Abelian Gauge Theories

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates electric-magnetic duality in four-dimensional N=1 supersymmetric non-Abelian gauge theories, showing how different theories can describe the same physics with dual interpretations of particles and phases.

Contribution

It provides explicit examples of dual gauge theories with different gauge groups and matter content that exhibit the same low-energy physics, illustrating the duality in non-Abelian supersymmetric theories.

Findings

Dual theories have equivalent low-energy physics.

Quarks and gluons can be interpreted as solitons in the dual theory.

Weak coupling in one theory corresponds to strong coupling in the dual.

Abstract

We demonstrate electric-magnetic duality in N=1 supersymmetric non-Abelian gauge theories in four dimensions by presenting two different gauge theories (different gauge groups and quark representations) leading to the same non-trivial long distance physics. The quarks and gluons of one theory can be interpreted as solitons (non-Abelian magnetic monopoles) of the elementary fields of the other theory. The weak coupling region of one theory is mapped to a strong coupling region of the other. When one of the theories is Higgsed by an expectation value of a squark, the other theory is confined. Massless glueballs, baryons and Abelian magnetic monopoles in the confining description are the weakly coupled elementary quarks (i.e.\ solitons of the confined quarks) in the dual Higgs description.