Abstract. We study electric-magnetic duality in the chiral ring of a supersymmetric U(N_c) gauge theory with adjoint and fundamental matter, in presence of a general confining phase superpotential for the adjoint and the mesons. We find the magnetic solution corresponding to both the pseudoconfining and Higgs electric vacua. By means of the Dijkgraaf-Vafa method, we match the effective glueball superpotentials and show that in some cases duality works exactly offshell. We give also a picture of the analytic structure of the resolvents in the magnetic theory, as we smoothly interpolate between different Higgs vacua on the electric side.

Key words: Duality in Gauge Field Theories; Supersymmetry and Duality; Supersymmetric Effective Theories; Matrix Models

Received 13 September 2004, accepted for publication 9 November 2004
Published 2 December 2004