Confining vacua in SQCD, the Konishi anomaly and the Dijkgraaf-Vafa superpotential

A bstract In this paper we revisit the analysis of vacua in = 2 SQCD with generic bare quark masses, softly broken by a mass term for the chiral superfield Φ in the adjoint representation of the gauge group. These vacua are labelled by an integer r (r vacua) and can be studied at the semiclassical level by means of the equations of motion (for large mass) or nonperturbatively by means of the Seiberg-Witten curve (for small mass). Making use of the Konishi anomaly and of the Dijkgraaf-Vafa superpotential we are able to interpolate between these two limits and better understand the properties of these vacua. In particular, we clarify the origin of the two to one map that relates semiclassical to quantum vacua.