2013/05/20 by Kenneth Intriligator, Nathan Seiberg · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Chern–Simons theory #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Coulomb #Duality (order theory) #Electron #Gauge theory #Higgs boson #Magnetic monopole #Mathematical physics #Mathematics #Mirror symmetry #Nonlinear system #Physics #Pure mathematics #Quantization (signal processing) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum mechanics #Soliton #Theoretical physics #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep07(2013)079
76 pages, 1 figure. v2: added references
arxiv created 2013/05/20 · openalex publication_date 2013/07/01 · arxiv updated 2015/06/15 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We comment on various aspects of the the dynamics of 3d N=2 Chern-Simons gauge theories and their possible phases. Depending on the matter content, real masses and FI parameters, there can be non-compact Higgs or Coulomb branches, compact Higgs or Coulomb branches, and isolated vacua. We compute the Witten index of the theories, and show that it does not change when the system undergoes a phase transition. We study aspects of monopole operators and solitons in these theories, and clarify subtleties in the soliton collective coordinate quantization. We show that solitons are compatible with a mirror symmetry exchange of Higgs and Coulomb branches, with BPS solitons on one branch related to the modulus of the other. Among other results, we show how to derive Aharony duality from Giveon-Kutasov duality.