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High Energy Physics Seminar - Guido Festuccia (Uppsala Universitet, Sweden) - "Metastable Vacua in Large-N QCD"

Guido Festuccia (Uppsala Universitet, Swenden) 2/24/20 High Energy Physics seminar speaker
February 24, 2020
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
1080 Physics Research Building, Smith Seminar room @ 3:30pm

I will discuss three-dimensional QCD with gauge group SU(N), and Nfundamental quark flavors. I will show that at leading order in large-N there are Nf +1 , exactly degenerate,  vacuum superselection sectors with different patterns of flavor-symmetry breaking. The associated massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons are accompanied by topological Chern-Simons theories. This set of vacua contains many candidate phases previously proposed for QCD3. At subleading order in the large-N expansion, the exact degeneracy between the different superselection sectors is lifted, giving rise to a multitude of metastable vacua. Dialing the quark masses, different metastable vacua become the true vacuum of the theory, leading to a sequence of first-order phase transitions. This intricate large-N dynamics is captured by previously proposed bosonic dual theories for QCD3, provided that they have a suitable scalar potential. Interestingly, this potential must include terms beyond quartic order in the scalar fields.