Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Why is Seiberg duality called an electromagnetic duality?

+ 4 like - 0 dislike
2003 views

An electromagnetic duality is a duality that maps electric to magnetic degrees of freedom of two distinct theories. Apart from source-less Maxwell electrodynamics, other theories require magnetic monopoles. I am not an expert in ($N=1$) Seiberg duality but as far as I know there is no magnetic charges in it. So why is it called an electromagnetic duality? Where are the "magnetic" degree of freedom of the theories? My guess is just because it is also an S-duality such as the Montonen-Olive or GNO dualities. Yet their are much different. The EM duality in the sense of Montonen-Olive is exact in the sense that it is (conjectured) valid at any scale. The Seiberg duality however is a map valid only at particular regimes. The Seiberg duality maps the IR regime of the "electric" theory to an IR free regime of a "magnetic" theory. This map is not valid along the RG flow.

Note: I now that Seiberg assume magnetic monopoles in the theory. But how do these monopoles appear? If they are topological solutions, where is the spontaneous symmetry breaking pattern? Where is the homotopy condition for stable monopoles? Where are the field confiturations of these solitons? Where is the magnetic charge quantization? What are the topological charge or topological sectors of these monopoles?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:19 (UTC), posted by SE-user Diracology
asked May 13, 2016 in Theoretical Physics by Diracology (120 points) [ no revision ]

1 Answer

+ 0 like - 0 dislike

They're not different at all! Seiberg has used the term electric-magnetic duality in the title of his famous paper, too.

His duality is an electric-magnetic duality because the duality relates two descriptions and objects that are electrically charged under the gauge group on one side (e.g. quarks and gluons) are mapped to solitons (forms of magnetic monopoles) carrying the magnetic monopole charges under the gauge group in the dual description! So just like there is an "$SU(3)$-like" electric field $F_{0i}$ around a quark or gluon in the electric description, the same object looks like a magnetic field $F_{jk}$ in the dual description – and under the other description's gauge group.

Because this duality avoids an immediate contradiction, it must simultaneously be an S-duality, too. It couldn't be a weak-weak duality because the weak-coupling physics of any gauge theory is basically unique. "Easy to construct" excitations (quarks and gluons) may only be mapped to "complicated objects" (solitons) if the coupling is strong on one side.

Seiberg duality is just a generalization of the usual $F_{\mu\nu}\to *F_{\mu\nu}$ electric-magnetic duality of the Maxwell's theory, a generalization with different and more complex gauge groups on both sides, supersymmetry, and some quark matter. In Maxwell's theory, one can arguably "ban" magnetic monopoles but in non-Abelian gauge theories with complicated enough spectrum, they're basically unavoidable because one may construct them as classical solitonic solutions and these objects have to exist in the quantum theory, too.

In $d=4$, electric-magnetic duality and S-duality are basically synonyms. In different spacetime dimensionalities, these two notions become different because the electric-magnetic duality exchanges point-like charges with some branes of a different dimension while an S-duality should preserve the dimensionality (and location) of objects. To allow a more general symmetry that mixes the charges of different dimensions etc., one has to call it a U-duality.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:19 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl
answered May 13, 2016 by Luboš Motl (10,278 points) [ no revision ]
Most voted comments show all comments
OK, I can only recommend you a basic school in that case because you must clearly be illiterate. The paper is all about the monopoles, they're written everywhere. Are you able to read this sentence? All your questions are answered in the paper. If you are looking for confused laymen who share your basic misconceptions about the paper, you should go to a different server. This is a server with questions and answers about physics and I gave you the correct answer to your question and I expect to be thanked for that, not to argue with the very person who asked the question.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl
How do you prove these monopoles in his paper are solitons?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Diracology
Sorry, you shouldn't study this advanced physics at this point because you clearly lack the totally basic prerequisites. Every magnetic monopole in every field theory must be described as a soliton - the magnetic monopole as a set of objects is by definition a subset of the set of solitons, a major example of solitons. This very statement is made clear at many points of the paper as well - but students normally learn it a long time before they are given Seiberg's papers to read. Magnetic monopoles are mostly the first examples of solitons that people learn.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl
But even if one could discuss magnetic monopoles without ever talking about solitons, it wouldn't change anything about the fact that the Seiberg duality is an electric-magnetic duality because it exchanges electrically charged objects with the magnetically charged objects.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl
I definitely know what a soliton is and how solitons appear in field theories. I also know the necessary conditions for a stable and charged quantized magnetic monopole. And I know how to explicitly obtain the solutions. In fact I might lack knowledge about Seiberg duality, but I have not seen any of these in his work. That is why I am asking, otherwise why would I be here? Well I will not continuous this unfruitful discussion. I hope there is no bad feelings =)

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Diracology
Most recent comments show all comments
Why don't you send your disagreement to Seiberg by e-mail instead? Just boldly inform him that his 1500-citation paper is rubbish - although he may be getting mail from similar senders. Already in the abstract, arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9411149 , he surely writes that the dual theory has magnetic monopoles, they're identified with the electric sources of the first theory, and that's why it's an electric-magnetic duality. Whether the map applies at all scales or just in the IR limit is irrelevant, the words electric and magnetic have nothing to do with these issues.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:19 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl
Your point may be that there are no monopoles - but the correct, Seiberg's point, is that there are these monopoles, and that's really what this paper is all about, why it works, and why it's famous. The word "monopole" appears 18 times in the paper and there are specific formulae describing the superpotential, mass, and quantum numbers of these monopoles etc.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2016-07-13 17:20 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysi$\varnothing$sOverflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...