The Infrared Physics of Bad Theories

Assel, Benjamin; Cremonesi, Stefano

doi:10.21468/scipostphys.3.3.024

The Infrared Physics of Bad Theories

Assel, Benjamin; Cremonesi, Stefano

Authors

Benjamin Assel

Dr Stefano Cremonesi stefano.cremonesi@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

We study the complete moduli space of vacua of 3d N = 4 N=4 U ( N ) U(N) SQCD theories with N f Nf fundamentals, building on the algebraic description of the Coulomb branch, and deduce the low energy physics in any vacuum from the local geometry of the moduli space. We confirm previous claims for good and ugly SQCD theories, and show that bad theories flow to the same interacting fixed points as good theories with additional free twisted hypermultiplets. A Seiberg-like duality proposed for bad theories with N ≤ N f ≤ 2 N − 2 N≤Nf≤2N−2 is ruled out: the spaces of vacua of the putative dual theories are different. However such bad theories have a distinguished vacuum, which preserves all the global symmetries, whose infrared physics is that of the proposed dual. We finally explain previous results on sphere partition functions and elucidate the relation between the UV and IR R R-symmetry in this symmetric vacuum.

Citation

Assel, B., & Cremonesi, S. (2017). The Infrared Physics of Bad Theories. SciPost Physics, 3(3), Article 024. https://doi.org/10.21468/scipostphys.3.3.024

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Sep 8, 2017
Online Publication Date	Sep 28, 2017
Publication Date	Sep 28, 2017
Deposit Date	Aug 2, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Sep 29, 2017
Journal	SciPost Physics.
Print ISSN	2542-4653
Publisher	SciPost
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	3
Issue	3
Article Number	024
DOI	https://doi.org/10.21468/scipostphys.3.3.024
Related Public URLs	https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03403