Nonabelian superconductors: vortices and confinement in N=2 SQCD Original Research Article

We study nonabelian vortices (flux tubes) in SU(N) gauge theories, which are responsible for the confinement of (nonabelian) magnetic monopoles. In particular a detailed analysis is given of N=2 SQCD with gauge group SU(3) deformed by a small adjoint chiral multiplet mass. Tuning the bare quark masses (which we take to be large) to a common value m, we consider a particular vacuum of this theory in which an SU(2) subgroup of the gauge group remains unbroken. We consider 5⩾Nf⩾4 flavors so that the SU(2) sub-sector remains non asymptotically free: the vortices carrying nonabelian fluxes may be reliably studied in a semi-classical regime. We show that the vortices indeed acquire exact zero modes which generate global rotations of the flux in an SU(2)C+F group. We study an effective world sheet theory of these orientational zero modes which reduces to an N=2 O(3) sigma model in 1+1 dimensions. Mirror symmetry then teaches us that the dual SU(2) group is not dynamically broken.