't Hooft Monopole Operators and 3d N=4 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories

 

Prof Amihay Hanany
Imperial College London
 

17 Feb 2017 (Friday)
2:00 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

In this talk, the speaker will recall the notion of the ‘t Hooft monopole operator as a modification of the boundary condition in the path integral and apply it in the context of 3d N=4 supersymmetric gauge theories.

There are two branches to the moduli space of vacuum configurations, traditionally called Higgs branch and Coulomb branch. Both are singular (hyper Kahler) when masses and FI terms are set to 0, but behave in a very different way. While the classical Higgs branch receives no quantum corrections, the Coulomb branch is significantly changed in the quantum theory. The crucial point is that monopole operators are sufficient to account for all quantum corrections and the Coulomb branch becomes what we term: "The space of dressed monopole operators". The speaker will discuss these points and present simple examples.