Softly broken N=2 QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effects of soft supersymmetry breaking in N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories, providing exact formulas for the effective potential and mass spectrum, and analyzing confinement and vacuum structures.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism for arbitrary gauge groups and derives exact expressions for the effective potential and mass spectrum under soft breaking.

Findings

Exact effective potential for softly broken N=2 theories.

Detailed analysis of vacuum structure and confinement in SU(2).

Explicit mass spectrum results for SU(2) case.

Abstract

We analyze the possible soft breaking of $N=2$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with and without matter flavour preserving the analyticity properties of the Seiberg-Witten solution. We present the formalism for an arbitrary gauge group and obtain an exact expression for the effective potential. We describe in detail the onset of the confinement description and the vacuum structure for the pure $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills case and also some general features in the $SU(N)$ case. A general mass formula is obtained, as well as explicit results for the mass spectrum in the $SU(2)$ case.