Abstract

Strongly coupled phenomena in realistic QFTs are notoriously difficult to say anything very precise about, owing to the lack of theoretical control we have over quantum corrections. Supersymmetry offers the tantalising possibility of ‘miraculous cancellations’, allowing us to make exact quantitative statements valid for all values of the coupling. I will describe the 1994 work of Seiberg and Witten which led the way in this area, computing the exact low energy effective action of N=2 Super-Yang-Mills theory. Along the way we’ll see an electromagnetic duality between fundamental particles and solitons, an explicit mechanism for confinement and remarkable links to algebraic geometry, integrable systems and more.