On the derivation of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories and S-confining theories

Recent works argue that the pattern of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories can be derived from supersymmetric (SUSY) QCD with perturbation of anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking (AMSB). Nevertheless, despite the fact that AMSB needs to be a small (but still exact) perturbation, two other major problems remain unsolved: first, in order to derive the chiral symmetry breaking pattern, one needs to minimize the potential along a certain specific direction, identifying this direction fully as an outcome is nontrivial given the moduli space of degenerate vacua in the SUSY limit; second, when SUSY is broken, non-holomorphic states might emerge and be relevant for determining the vacuum structure. In this work, we try to resolve these problems and discuss their physical implica- tions. For this purpose, we focus on SUSY QCD with N-f <= N-c + 1 and perturb the theories using AMSB. Without minimizing the potential along a certain specific direction in the moduli space, we successfully derive the expected chiral symmetry breaking pattern when N-f < N-c. However, when N-f = N-c and N-f = N-c + 1, we show that tree-level AMSB would induce runaway directions, along which baryon number is spontaneously broken, and the vacua with broken baryon number can be deeper while the field values are not far from the origin. This implies that phase transitions and/or non-holomorphic physics are necessary. In order to derive the expected chiral symmetry breaking pattern of non-SUSY QCD starting from the SUSY limit and AMSB, baryon number conservation is needed as an input rather than obtained as an output. Moreover, we perform explicit consistency checks on ultraviolet insensitivity for different N-f by adding the holomorphic mass term for the last flavor, we find that the jump of AMSB potential indeed matches the contribution from the holomorphic mass term. We also show in general that, when tree-level AMSB is not vanishing, the origin of the moduli space in s-confining theories does not persist as a minimum.

Automated summary

Recent works argue that the pattern of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories can be derived from supersymmetric (SUSY) QCD with perturbation of anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking (AMSB). This study aims to resolve the problems in this derivation and discuss their physical implications. The authors successfully derive the expected chiral symmetry breaking pattern using AMSB, but find that phase transitions and non-holomorphic physics are necessary in certain cases. The study also confirms the consistency of the derived potential with holomorphic mass term contributions.