It is common for quantum field theories to lack a consistent, perturbative treatment. In most cases, this is because
the couplings flow to a strongly-coupled regime, and the
perturbative series diverges at all orders in these regimes.
In some cases, such
as those we will investigate for magnetic monopoles, the
dynamics are inherently nonperturbative.
In three dimensions, monopoles play the role of
instantons and induce important corrections to the theory which
are absent in a naive perturbative expansion around the trivial
vacuum.
In four dimensions, they appear as charged states,
and the scattering processes involving
electric and magnetic states fail to converge at any order in
perturbation theory.
We begin by studying the conditions for fundamental zero modes of the Kaluza-Klein monopole which arises in compactified four
dimensional theories. The existence of fundamental zero modes
provide a path to decouple the Kaluza-Klein monopole in the zero
radius limit such that the theory is purely three dimensional. We
study the correspondence between the three and four dimensional
theories under these effects.
Next, we study the moduli space for three dimensional supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theories with F
We now shift focus to an on-shell description of electric-magnetic scattering. Magnetically
charged particles are theoretically well-motivated, but it is
difficult to calculate the signatures of scattering events
involving both magnetic and electrically charged particles. This
cause for this difficulty is two-fold: there remains no local,
Lorentz invariant Lagrangian description of such theories, and
due to Dirac quantization, the coupling strength of the
interactions are never weakly-coupled. We develop on-shell
methods to study these processes, derive new selection rules,
and calculate fermion-monopole scattering.
We end by changing gears and presenting a phenomenological study of dark matter freeze-out where the universe experiences an early
QCD phase transition. Where dark matter freeze out is typically
driven by annihilation into quarks, here the active degrees of
freedom are mesons which alter the correspondence between the
dark matter couplings to the Standard Model
and the relic abundance of dark matter. We show that this model
can explain the observed dark
matter relic density while evading experimental constraints from
direct detection.