High Energy Theory Group Meeting: Confinement and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Near-SUSY Theories

Abstract: 

The study of non-supersymmetric, strongly coupled gauge theories is notoriously hard, and exact results are scarce. In this talk, I present a new way to study the vacua of near-supersymmetric theories by perturbing their supersymmetric versions with Anomaly Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (AMSB). Thanks to the UV-insensitivity of AMSB, SUSY results can be perturbed with no ambiguities, even when applied to composite fields. Using our method, we analyze the phases of $SO(N)$ gauge theory with flavors. The abelian Coulomb and free magnetic phases do not survive supersymmetry breaking and collapse to a confining phase, providing one of the first demonstrations of true confinement with chiral symmetry breaking in a non-supersymmetric vacuum. Our results are exact in the small SUSY breaking limit, and we briefly discuss the prospects of extrapolating them to large SUSY breaking.

Seminar Organizer: Andrea Guerrieri