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Published August 30, 2015 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

Strong gauging or decoupling ghost matter

Abstract

Gauging extra matter is a common way to couple two CFTs discontinuously. We may consider gauging matter by strongly coupled gauge theories at criticality rather than by weakly coupled (asymptotic free) gauge theories. It often triggers relevant deformations and possibly leads to a nontrivial fixed point. In many examples such as the IR limit of SQCDs (and their variants), the relevant RG flow induced by this strong gauging makes the total central charge a increase rather than decrease compared with the sum of the original decoupled CFTs. The dilaton effective field theory argument given by Komargodski and Schwimmer does not apply because strong gauging is not a simple deformation by operators in the original two decoupled CFTs and it may not be UV complete. When the added matter is vector-like, one may emulate strong gauging in a UV completed manner by decoupling of ghost matter. While the UV completed description makes the dilaton effective field theory argument possible, due to the nonunitarity, we cannot conclude the positivity of the central charge difference in accordance with the observations in various examples that show the contrary.

Additional Information

© 2015 World Scientific Publishing Company. Received 24 July 2015; Accepted 31 July 2015; Published 4 August 2015. The author would like to thank Slava Rychkov for correspondence and discussions. He also would like to express his sincere gratitude to the Weizmann Institute of Science for the hospitality during my stay. This work is supported by a Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and DOE Grant No. E-SC0011632.

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August 20, 2023
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