Electromagnetic Duality for Children JM Figueroa-O'Farrill
[email protected] Version of 8 October 1998 Contents I The Simplest Example: SO(3) 11 1 Classical Electromagnetic Duality 12 1.1 The Dirac Monopole ....................... 12 1.1.1 And in the beginning there was Maxwell... 12 1.1.2 The Dirac quantisation condition . 14 1.1.3 Dyons and the Zwanziger{Schwinger quantisation con- dition ........................... 16 1.2 The 't Hooft{Polyakov Monopole . 18 1.2.1 The bosonic part of the Georgi{Glashow model . 18 1.2.2 Finite-energy solutions: the 't Hooft{Polyakov Ansatz . 20 1.2.3 The topological origin of the magnetic charge . 24 1.3 BPS-monopoles .......................... 26 1.3.1 Estimating the mass of a monopole: the Bogomol'nyi bound ........................... 27 1.3.2 Saturating the bound: the BPS-monopole . 28 1.4 Duality conjectures ........................ 30 1.4.1 The Montonen{Olive conjecture . 30 1.4.2 The Witten e®ect ..................... 31 1.4.3 SL(2; Z) duality ...................... 33 2 Supersymmetry 39 2.1 The super-Poincar¶ealgebra in four dimensions . 40 2.1.1 Some notational remarks about spinors . 40 2.1.2 The Coleman{Mandula and Haag{ÃLopusza¶nski{Sohnius theorems .......................... 42 2.2 Unitary representations of the supersymmetry algebra . 44 2.2.1 Wigner's method and the little group . 44 2.2.2 Massless representations . 45 2.2.3 Massive representations . 47 No central charges .................... 48 Adding central charges . 49 1
[email protected] draft version of 8/10/1998 2.3 N=2 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills .