Emergent Non-Invertible Symmetries Bridging UV and IR Phases -- The Adjoint QCD Example

Abstract

In this letter, we demonstrate how an emergent non-invertible symmetry along a renormalization group (RG) flow reveals connections between microscopic and macroscopic physics. We illustrate this using (3+1)-dimensional Adjoint QCD with two flavors of Weyl fermions as an example. For the $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ case, C\'ordova and Dumitrescu proposed a non-supersymmetric deformation of the $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYM theory leading to dynamical abelianization, followed by monopole condensation, and resulting in a confining infrared (IR) phase characterized by disjoint copies of the $\mathbb{CP}^1$ sigma model. In this scenario, we point out that the abelianized phase has an emergent non-invertible symmetry, which is matched with the non-invertible symmetry of the IR $\mathbb{CP}^1$ phase, associated to the Hopf solitons. This result illustrate how an emergent non-invertible symmetry can be used to provide a bridge connecting the IR solitons and their properties with the ones of microscopic degrees of freedom in gauge theories with one-form symmetries. Moreover, based on this insight we generalize these results to other gauge theories with any number of colors, and propose a candidate for the UV baryon operator in all these cases.