Dynamical Symmetry Breaking in Supersymmetric SU(nc) and USp(2nc) Gauge Theories

We find the phase and flavor symmetry breaking pattern of each N = 1 supersymmetric vacuum of SU(nc) and USp(2nc) gauge theories, constructed from the exactly solvable N = 2 theories by perturbing them with small adjoint and generic bare hypermultiplet (quark) masses. In SU(nc) theories with nf ≤ nc the vacua are labelled by an integer r, in which the flavor U(nf ) symmetry is dynamically broken to U(r) × U(nf − r) in the limit of vanishing bare hyperquark masses. In the r = 1 vacua the dynamical symmetry breaking is caused by the condensation of magnetic monopoles in the nf representation. For general r, however, the monopoles in the nfCr representation, whose condensation could explain the flavor symmetry breaking but would produce too-many Nambu–Goldstone multiplets, actually “break up” into “magnetic quarks”: the latter with nonabelian interactions condense and induce confinement and dynamical symmetry breaking. In USp(2nc) theories with nf ≤ nc + 1, the flavor SO(2nf ) symmetry is dynamically broken to U(nf ), but with no description in terms of a weakly coupled local field theory. In both SU(nc) and USp(2nc) theories, with larger numbers of quark flavors, besides the vacua with these properties, there exist also vacua in free magnetic phase, with unbroken global symmetry. IFUP-TH 2000-8; SWAT-00/255; UCB-PTH-00/07; LBNL-45323