Exploring the phases of gauge theories via Anomaly Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (AMSB) [Special Free Meson seminar as part of the DP Roy Memorial Lecture]

Finding the vacuum structure of strongly coupled gauge theories is one of the important unsolved questions in particle physics. Within supersymmetric (SUSY) theories many of these questions have been largely resolved in the 1990's following the work of Seiberg and others, however so far we have not been able to convincingly connect these results to their non-supersymmetric counterparts. Recently Murayama proposed to use anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) to introduce the SUSY  breaking terms which allows finding results consistent with the qualitative expectations for the structure of the non-SUSY theories. In this talk I first show how what the resulting phase structure of the QCD-like theories obtained from perturbing SUSY QCD via AMSB is, and that the expected vauca with chiral symmetry breaking are present for any number of flavors F< 3N at least as local minima. I then apply this method to a class of chiral gauge theories based on antisymmetric and symmetric representations, which leads us to propose novel symmetry breaking patterns for the vacuum of these theories, and calls for modification of the old tumbling picture of confinement in chiral gauge theories. Finally I apply the method to the SO(N) series and show that for F< 3/2 (N-2) the theory will be confining, where the dynamics of confinement is monopole condensation, and identify the resulting global symmetry breaking pattern.