Light Nonabelian Monopoles and Generalized r-Vacua in Supersymmetric Gauge Theories

Abstract

We study a class of N=1 supersymmetric U(N) gauge theories and find that there exist vacua in which the low-energy magnetic effective gauge group contains multiple nonabelian factors, \prod_i SU(r_i), supported by light monopoles carrying the associated nonabelian charges. These nontrivially generalize the physics of the so-called r-vacua found in softly broken N=2 supersymmetric SU(N) QCD, with an effective low-energy gauge group SU(r) \times U(1)^{N-r}. The matching between classical and quantum (r_{1}, r_{2},...) vacua gives an interesting hint about the nonabelian duality.