String Theory Seminar

Thursday, February 21, 2002
K. Narayan (Cornell University),
Marginal stability, string webs and bound states in SYM theories
The spectrum of supersymmetric states can change discontinuously as one changes the vacuum on the moduli space of gauge theories with extended supersymmetry in four dimensions. This decay can be understood and is well described by semiclassical field configurations purely within the low energy effective action, even at strong coupling. The resulting picture of the BPS spectrum generalizes the string web description of BPS states found in string constructions of some theories.