Nonabelian Monopoles and Confinement: New Prospects

We discuss quantum mechanical aspects of non abelian monopoles in relation to the phenomena of confinement and dynamical symmetry breaking. In supersymmetric theories there are three types of confining vacua have been found: (i) abelian dual superconductor; (ii) weakly-coupled nonabelian dual superconductor; and (iii) strongly-coupled, nonabelian Argyres-Douglas vacua. The last class of systems occur very generally in supersymmetric theories; they are characterized by strongly-coupled nonabelian monopoles and dyons: confinement and dynamical symmetry breaking are caused by the condensation of monopole composites, rather than by condensation of single weakly-coupled monopoles. There are strong constraints on which kind of monopoles can appear as the infrared degrees of freedom, related to the proper realization of the global symmetry of the theory. Drawing analogies to some of the phenomena found here, we make a speculation on the ground state of the standard QCD.