Domain Walls in Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories

TL;DR

This paper analyzes domain walls in supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories, confirming their BPS nature, deriving explicit profiles, and exploring effects of soft SUSY breaking and vacuum structure.

Contribution

It provides explicit domain wall profiles using corrected effective Lagrangians and confirms their BPS saturation and energy expressions, extending understanding of vacuum structure and SUSY breaking effects.

Findings

Walls are BPS-saturated with exact energy densities.

Explicit wall profiles are derived from effective Lagrangians.

Soft gluino mass breaks vacuum degeneracy and affects decay rates.

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the domain walls in supersymmetric gluodynamics and SQCD. We use the (corrected) Veneziano-Yankielowicz effective Lagrangians to explicitely obtain the wall profiles and check recent results of Dvali and Shifman (Phys. Lett. B396, (1997) 64: (i) the BPS-saturated nature of the walls; (ii) the exact expressions for the wall energy density which depend only on global features of dynamics (the existence of a non-trivial central extension of N=1 superalgebra in the theories which admit wall-like solutions). If supersymmetry is softly broken by the gluino mass, the degeneracy of the distinct vacua is gone, and one can consider the decay rate of the "false" vacuum into the genuine one. We do this calculation in the limit of the small gluino mass. Finally, we comment on the controversy regarding the existence of $N$ distinct chirally asymmetric vacua in SU(N) SUSY gluodynamics.