Dynamics of strongly-coupled chiral gauge theories

Abstract

We study the dynamics of SU(N) chiral gauge theories with massless fermions belonging to various combinations of the symmetric, antisymmetric or fundamental representations. We limit ourselves to the gauge-anomaly-free and asymptotically free systems. These theories have a global symmetry group with the associated ’t Hooft anomaly-matching conditions severely limiting the possible RG flows. Recent developments on the applications of the generalized symmetries and the stronger requirement of the matching of the mixed anomalies also give further indications on the possible IR dynamics. In vectorlike theories such as the quantum chromodynamics (QCD), gauge-invariant “quark-antiquark” condensates form and characterize the IR dynamics, and the anomaly matching involves the Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons. In some other special cases, such as the Bars-Yankielowicz (BY) or Georgi-Glashow (GG) models, a hypothetical solution was proposed in the literature, with no global symmetry breaking and with some simple set of composite massless fermions saturating all the anomalies. For the BY and GG systems, actually, a more plausible candidate for their IR physics is the dynamical Higgs phase, with a few simple bi-fermion color-flavor locked condensates, breaking the color and flavor symmetries, partially or totally. Remarkably, the ’t Hooft anomaly-matching (and generalized anomaly-matching) conditions are automatically satisfied in this phase. Another interesting possibility, occurring in some chiral gauge theories, is dynamical Abelianization, familiar from N = 2 supersymmetric gauge theories. We explore here even more general types of possible IR phases than the ones mentioned above, for wider classes of models. With the help of large-N arguments we look for IR free theories, whereas the MAC (maximal attractive channel) criterion might suggest some simple bi-fermion condensates characterizing the IR dynamics of the systems. In many cases the low-energy effective theories are found to be described by quiver-like gauge theories, some of the (nonAbelian) gauge groups are infrared-free while some others might be asymptotically free.