English

Confining Strings in Supersymmetric Theories with Higgs Branches

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-03-11 v2

Abstract

We study flux tubes (strings) on the Higgs branches in supersymmetric gauge theories. In generic vacua on the Higgs branches strings were shown to develop long-range "tails" associated with massless fields, a characteristic feature of the Higgs branch (the only exception is the vacuum at the base of the Higgs branch). A natural infrared regularization for the above tails is provided by a finite string length L. We perform a numerical study of these strings in generic vacua. We focus on the simplest example of strings in N=1 supersymmetric QED with the Fayet-Iliopoulos term. In particular, we examine the accuracy of a logarithmic approximation (proposed earlier by Evlampiev and Yung) for the tension of such string solutions. In the Evlampiev-Yung formula the dependence of tension on the string length is logarithmic and the dependence on the geodesic length from the base of the Higgs branch is quadratic. We observe a remarkable agreement of our numerical results for the string tension with the Evlampiev-Yung analytic expression.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.3927,
  title  = {Confining Strings in Supersymmetric Theories with Higgs Branches},
  author = {Mikhail Shifman and Gianni Tallarita and Alexei Yung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.3927},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, 5 figures, version accepted in Physical Review D