Related papers: From Decay to Complete Breaking: Pulling the Strin…
The N=2* theory (mass deformation of N=4 Super-Yang-Mills) undergoes an infinite number of quantum phase transitions in the large-N limit. The phase structure and critical behavior can be analyzed with the help of supersymmetric…
We provide an explicit construction of 1/4 BPS states in four-dimensional N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory with a gauge group SU(3). These states correspond to three-pronged strings connecting three D3-branes. We also find curves of marginal…
We study strings between static quarks in QCD with $n_f$ adjoint fermions, including $N=1$ Super Yang-Mills (SYM), in the calculable regime on $\mathbb R^3\times \mathbb S^1$. We find that they have many qualitatively new features not…
We compute and analyse the low-lying spectrum of 2+1 dimensional $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory on a spatial torus of size $l\times l$ with twisted boundary conditions. This paper extends our previous work \cite{Perez:2013dra}. In that paper we…
An uncontroversial observation of adjoint string breaking is proposed, while measuring the static potential from Wilson loops only. The overlap of the Wilson loop with the broken-string state is small, but non-vanishing, so that the…
In the presence of a static quark--antiquark pair, the spectrum of the low-lying states in SU($N$) gauge theories is discrete and likely to be described, at large quark separations $r$, by an effective string theory. The expansion of the…
We consider generalized self-duality equations for U(2r) Yang-Mills theory on R^8 with quaternionic structure. We employ the extended ADHM method in eight dimensions to construct exact soliton solutions of the low-energy effective theory of…
We extend previous work on the soft breaking of $N=2$ supersymmetric QCD. We present the formalism for the breaking due to a dilaton spurion for a general gauge group and obtain the exact effective potential. We obtain some general features…
We show that the string tension in N=1 two-dimensional super Yang-Mills theory vanishes independently of the representation of the quark anti-quark external source. We argue that this result persists in SQCD_2 and in two-dimensional gauge…
We study string breaking in the three dimensional SU(2) Higgs model, using values of the gauge coupling for which the confinement-like and Higgs-like regions of the phase diagram are separated just by a smooth crossover. We show that even…
Previously it has been shown that in spin-charge separated SU(2) Yang-Mills theory Lorentz invariance can become broken by a one-cocycle that appears in the Lorentz boosts. Here we study in detail the structure of this one-cocycle. In…
Phase and modulus of an energy- and pressure-free, composite and adjoint field in an SU(2) Yang-Mills theory are computed. This field is generated by trivial holonomy calorons of topological charge one. It possesses nontrivial $S_1$-winding…
Yang Mills theory in 2+1 dimensions can be expressed as an array of coupled (1+1)-dimensional principal chiral sigma models. The $SU(N)\times SU(N)$ principal chiral sigma model in 1+1 dimensions is integrable, asymptotically free and has…
We describe a topological string theory which reproduces many aspects of the 1/N expansion of SU(N) Yang-Mills theory in two spacetime dimensions in the zero coupling (A=0) limit. The string theory is a modified version of topological…
The effective action of N=2 Yang-Mills theory with adjoint matter is shown to be governed by an integrable spin model with spectral parameter on an elliptic curve. We sketch a route to deriving this effective dynamics from the underlying…
Various recently developed connections between supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories in four dimensions and two dimensional integrable systems serve as crucial ingredients in improving our understanding of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In this…
We inspect the excitation energy spectrum of a confining string in terms of solitons in an effective field theory model. The spectrum can be characterized by a spectral function, and twisting and bending of the string is manifested by the…
We conjecture the existence of strings bounded inside walls in SU$(n)$ $\N=1$ Super Yang-Mills theory. These strings carry $\Z_{[k,n]}$ quantum number, where $[k,n]$ is the greatest common divisor between $k$, the charge of the wall, and…
We measure the free energies in SU(2) of static fundamental charges and center monopoles. Dual to temporal center fluxes, the former provide a well-defined (dis)order parameter for deconfinement. In contrast, the monopole free energies…
Confinement prohibits isolation of color charges, e.g., quarks, in nature via a process called string breaking: the separation of two charges results in an increase in the energy of a color flux, visualized as a string, connecting those…