Aspects of Superconformal Field Theories

Abstract

Recently, a lot of progress has been made towards understanding the strongly coupled supersymmetric quantum gauge theories. The problem of strong coupling for SU(N) gauge theories can be formulated in two separate regimes of interest, one at finite N and the other at large N in 't Hooft limit. In the first case electric/magnetic duality also called S-duality and in the second, AdS/CFT duality map the strongly coupled problem to a weakly coupled one. Both of the dualities have been well understood in the maximally supersymmetric 4d gauge theory, the N=4 super Yang-Mills. In this thesis, as a natural next step, we focus on the strong coupling behavior in N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories.