Recent Advances in Supersymmetric Gauge Theories. Dualities, confinement, dynamical symmetry breaking and BPS spectroscopy

      Аннотация: In the past decades supersymmetric field theories have been the subject of intense research activity and represent an important theoretical laboratory which allows us to investigate the dynamics of strongly-coupled field theories. In particular, recently there has been a huge progress in our understanding of N=2 theories in four dimensions. The scope of this book is on the one hand to provide a review of these new developments and on the other to illustrate what one can learn from these results about intrinsically strongly-coupled phenomena, such as confinement and dynamical symmetry breaking. We review the Seiberg-Witten solution of four dimensional N=2 gauge theories, the six-dimensional construction of these models recently proposed by Gaiotto and the BPS quiver technique for the determination of the BPS spectrum of N=2 theories. Equipped with this machinery we then turn our attention to the analysis of softly broken N=2 SQCD, finding an unusual realization of the 't Hooft-Mandelstam mechanism for confinement. The book is addressed to graduate students and researchers interested in formal aspects of supersymmetric theories and with a good field theory background.

Ключевые слова: Supersymmetry, M-Theory, Confinement, Dualities, solitons, monopoles, branes, non perturbative effects