Abstract
We study the mechanism of confinement via the formation of Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen vortices on the Higgs branch of N = 2 supersymmetric SU(2) gauge theory with massive fundamental matter. Higgs branch represents a limiting case of a superconductor of type I with vanishing Higgs mass. We show that in this limit vortices still exist although they become logarithmically "thick". Because of this the confining potential is not linear any longer. It behaves as L/log L with distance L between the confining heavy charges (monopoles). This new confining regime can occur only in supersymmetric theories. We also address the problem of the quantum stability of vortices. To this end we develop a string representation for a vortex and use it to argue that vortices remain stable.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 191-209 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Nuclear Physics B |
| Volume | 562 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 22 1999 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author is grateful to A. Gorsky, A. Marshakov, V. Rubakov, and A. Schwimmer for useful discussions. In particular, the author would like to thank A. Vainshtein for numerous and very illuminating discussions. Also the author is grateful to the Theoretical Physics group at the University of Minnesota where part of this work was done for hospitality. This work is supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research under Grant No. 99-02-16576.
Keywords
- Confinement
- Supersymmetry
- Vortices