Duality, monopoles, dyons, confinement and oblique confinement in supersymmetric SO(nc) gauge theories

Abstract We study supersymmetric SO(Nc) gauge theories with Nf flavors of quarks in the vector representation. Among the phenomena we find are dynamically generated superpotentials with physically inequivalent branches, smooth moduli spaces of vacua, confinement and oblique confinement, confinement without chiral symmetry breaking, massless composites (glueballs, exotics, monopoles and dyons), non-trivial fixed points of the renormalization group and massless magnetic quarks and gluons. Our analysis sheds new light on a recently found duality in N = 1 supersymmetric theories. The dual forms of some of the theories exhibit “quantum symmetries” which involve non-local transformations on the fields. We find that in some cases the duality has both S and T transformations generating SL( 2, Z ) (only an S3 quotient of which is realized nontrivially). They map the original non-Abelian electric theory to magnetic and dyonic non-Abelian theories. The magnetic theory gives a weak coupling description of confinement while the dyonic theory gives a weak coupling description of oblique confinement. Our analysis also shows that ] the duality in N = 1 is a generalization of the Montonen-Olive duality of N = 4 theories.