Electric-magnetic duality, monopole condensation, and confinement in N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

We study the vacuum structure and dyon spectrum of N=2 supersymmetric gauge\ntheory in four dimensions, with gauge group SU(2). The theory turns out to have\nremarkably rich and physical properties which can nonetheless be described\nprecisely; exact formulas can be obtained, for instance, for electron and dyon\nmasses and the metric on the moduli space of vacua. The description involves a\nversion of Olive-Montonen electric-magnetic duality. The ``strongly coupled''\nvacuum turns out to be a weakly coupled theory of monopoles, and with a\nsuitable perturbation confinement is described by monopole condensation.\n