Phases of N=1 theories and factorization of Seiberg-Witten curves

Abstract

In this talk I review the structure of vacua of N=2 theories broken down to N=1 and it's link with factorization of Seiberg-Witten curves. After an introduction to the structure of vacua in various supersymmetric gauge theories, I discuss the use of the exact factorization solution to identify different dual descriptions of the same physics and to count the number of connected domains in the space of N=1 vacua.

Comments: 13 pages, 2 figures. Talk presented at the XLV School of Theoretical Physics, Zakopane, 3-12 June 2005