Spontaneous conformal symmetry breaking and a massless Wu-Yang monopole

Abstract

A formulation of $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with a spacetime-dependent gauge coupling allows to study the breaking of conformal symmetry at the quantum level. The theory has an energy-momentum tensor that is only conserved if an equation of motion for the coupling is imposed. It admits non-trivial solitons, among which the Wu-Yang monopole that can be regularized and turns out to be massless. On the other hand, the ordinary BPS monopole is only a solution in the large $N_c$ limit.

Comments: 17 pages + 7 pages appendix + references