Duality and confinement in SO(N) gauge theories

Abstract

The presence of magnetic monopole like excitations of nonabelian varieties is one of the subtlest consequences of spontaneously broken gauge symmetries. Important hints about their quantum mechanical properties, which remained long mysterious, are coming from a detailed knowledge of the dynamics of supersymmetric gauge theories which has become available recently. These developments might shed light on the problem of confinement and dynamical symmetry breaking in QCD. We discuss here some beautiful features of vortex-monopole systems, in which dual nonabelian transformations among monopoles are generated by the nonabelian vortex moduli.