High Energy Theory Seminar

Monopole operators play an important role in the dynamics of three-dimensional conformal field theories. In this talk, I will explain how to use the 1/N_f expansion to study these operators at the infrared fixed points of non-Abelian gauge theories with N_f fermion flavors. At large N_f, the gauge field fluctuations are suppressed, and one can associate independent monopole operators to stable monopole backgrounds via the state-operator correspondence. I will discuss the stability of these backgrounds, calculate the scaling dimension of the corresponding monopole operators through next-to-leading order in 1/N_f, and describe their transformation properties under the flavor symmetry. These results give estimates for the number of flavors below which the theory confines and breaks "chiral symmetry". These estimates are consistent with bounds obtained using the F-theorem. This talk is based on 1309.1160 with E. Dyer and S. Pufu.