Fractional instantons in 2d $\mathbb{C}P^{N-1}$ model and 4d Yang-Mills theory with 't Hooft twists
Abstract
We derive the explicit formula for fractional BPS lumps (or fractional instantons) in the nonlinear sigma model on a two-dimensional torus under various shift-clock twisted boundary conditions. After regularizing the model by an -component Abelian-Higgs model, those twisted boundary conditions introduce nontrivial 't~Hooft fluxes for the gauge field, and the topological charge becomes fractionalized as . The moduli space is globally determined as the -fiber bundle on a -torus, which is a K\"ahler manifold of complex dimension as predicted by the index theorem. We present two different parametrizations of the moduli space: one of them immediately identifies the small-lump singularity appearing in the limit, while the other makes the modular invariance manifest. We also discuss the implications of our finding for the d Yang-Mills theory on the -torus with 't~Hooft twists. By tuning the aspect ratio of the 4-torus, fractional instantons in the model with a non-Fubini-Study metric are obtained through the dimensional reduction of d Yang-Mills theory, whose moduli space coincides with the one obtained for the standard model as complex manifolds.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.12802,
title = {Fractional instantons in 2d $\mathbb{C}P^{N-1}$ model and 4d Yang-Mills theory with 't Hooft twists},
author = {Yui Hayashi and Tatsuhiro Misumi and Muneto Nitta and Keisuke Ohashi and Yuya Tanizaki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.12802},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
41+16 pages, 3 figures