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Phases Of Adjoint QCD$_3$ And Dualities

Jaume Gomis, Zohar Komargodski, Nathan Seiberg

SciPost Phys. 5, 007 (2018) · published 23 July 2018

Abstract

We study 2+1 dimensional gauge theories with a Chern-Simons term and a fermion in the adjoint representation. We apply general considerations of symmetries, anomalies, and renormalization group flows to determine the possible phases of the theory as a function of the gauge group, the Chern-Simons level $k$, and the fermion mass. We propose an inherently quantum mechanical phase of adjoint QCD with small enough $k$, where the infrared is described by a certain Topological Quantum Field Theory (TQFT). For a special choice of the mass, the theory has ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetry. There this TQFT is accompanied by a massless Majorana fermion - a Goldstino signaling spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Our analysis leads us to conjecture a number of new infrared fermion-fermion dualities involving $SU$, $SO$, and $Sp$ gauge theories. It also leads us to suggest a phase diagram of $SO/Sp$ gauge theories with a fermion in the traceless symmetric/antisymmetric tensor representation of the gauge group.

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Ontology / Topics

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Anomalies Chern-Simons theory Dualities Gauge theory N=1 supersymmetry Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) Renormalization group (RG) Spontaneous symmetry breaking Supersymmetry Topological quantum field theories (TQFT)

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