The Chiral Ring and the Periods of the Resolvent

The strongly coupled vacua of an N=1 supersymmetric gauge theory can be described by imposing quantization conditions on the periods of the gauge theory resolvent, or equivalently by imposing factorization conditions on the associated N=2 Seiberg-Witten curve (the so-called strong-coupling approach). We show that these conditions are equivalent to the existence of certain relations in the chiral ring, which themselves follow from the fact that the gauge group has a finite rank. This provides a conceptually very simple explanation of why and how the strongly coupled physics of N=1 theories, including fractional instanton effects, chiral symmetry breaking and confinement, can be derived from purely semi-classical calculations involving instantons only.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure; v2: cosmetic change

Extending the Veneziano-Yankielowicz Effective Theory

We extend the Veneziano Yankielowicz (VY) effective theory in order to account for ordinary glueball states. We propose a new form of the superpotential including a chiral superfield for the glueball degrees of freedom. When integrating it ``out'' we obtain the VY superpotential while the N vacua of the theory naturally emerge. This fact has a counterpart in the Dijkgraaf and Vafa geometric approach. We suggest a link of the new field with the underlying degrees of freedom which allows us to integrate it ``in'' the VY theory. We finally break supersymmetry by adding a gluino mass and show that the Kahler independent part of the ``potential'' has the same form of the ordinary Yang-Mills glueball effective potential.Comment: LaTeX, 20 page

Explicit Analysis of Kahler Deformations in 4D N=1 Supersymmetric Quiver Theories

Starting from the $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYM$_{4}$ quiver theory living on wrapped $$ branes around $S_{i}^{2}$ spheres of deformed ADE fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds (CY3) and considering deformations using \textit{% massive} vector multiplets, we explicitly build a new class of $\mathcal{N}$ quiver gauge theories. In these models, the quiver gauge group $\prod_{i}U(N_{i})$ is spontaneously broken down to $$ and Kahler deformations are shown to be given by the real part of the integral $(2,1)$ form of CY3. We also give the superfield correspondence between the $\mathcal{N}=1$ quiver gauge models derived here and those constructed in hep-th/0108120 using complex deformations. Others aspects of these two dual $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric field theories are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

On the Geometry of Matrix Models for N=1*

We investigate the geometry of the matrix model associated with an N=1 super Yang-Mills theory with three adjoint fields, which is a massive deformation of N=4. We study in particular the Riemann surface underlying solutions with arbitrary number of cuts. We show that an interesting geometrical structure emerges where the Riemann surface is related on-shell to the Donagi-Witten spectral curve. We explicitly identify the quantum field theory resolvents in terms of geometrical data on the surface.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures. v2: reference adde