English

Two roads to fortuity in ABJM theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-19 v3

Abstract

A recently proposed addition to the holographic dictionary connects extremal black holes to fortuitous operators -- those which are only supersymmetric for sufficiently small values of the central charge. The most efficient techniques for finding them come from studying the cohomology of a nilpotent supercharge. We explore two aspects of this problem in weakly-coupled ABJM theory, where the gauge group is U(N)×U(N)\mathrm{U}(N) \times \mathrm{U}(N) and the Chern-Simons level is taken to be large. Adapting an algorithm which has been used to great effect in N=4\mathcal{N} = 4 Super Yang-Mills, we enumerate 244 low-lying fortuitous operators and sort them into multiplets of the centralizer algebra. This leads to the construction of two leading fortuitous representatives for N=3N = 3 which are subleading for N=2N = 2. In the second part of this work, we identify a truncation of ABJM theory where the action of the one-loop supercharge matches the one in the BMN subsector of N=4\mathcal{N} = 4 Super Yang-Mills. This allows a known infinite tower of representatives to be lifted from one theory to the other.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.23603,
  title  = {Two roads to fortuity in ABJM theory},
  author = {Connor Behan and Leonardo Pipolo de Gioia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23603},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

32 + 11 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, v3: Journal Version