Lessons from supersymmetry: "Instead-of-Confinement" Mechanism

Abstract

We review physical scenarios in different vacua of N=2 supersymmetric QCD deformed by the mass term \mu for the adjoint matter. This deformation breaks supersymmetry down to N=1 and, at large \mu, the theory flows to N=1 SQCD. We focus on dynamical scenarios which can serve as prototypes of what we observe in real-world QCD. The so-called r=N vacuum is especially promising in this perspective. In this vacuum an "instead-of-confinement" phase was identified previously, which is qualitatively close to the conventional QCD confinement: the quarks and gauge bosons screened at weak coupling, at strong coupling evolve into monopole-antimonopole pairs confined by non-Abelian strings. We review genesis of this picture.