Monopole Taxonomy in Three-Dimensional Conformal Field Theories

Understand

We study monopole operators at the infrared fixed points of Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories with N_f fermion flavors in three dimensions.

• At large N_f, independent monopole operators can be defined via the state-operator correspondence only for stable monopole backgrounds.
• In Abelian theories, every monopole background is stable.
• In the non-Abelian case, we find that many (but not all) backgrounds are stable in each topological class.