Related papers: Surface defects and instanton partition functions
We study half-BPS line defects in $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal theories using the bootstrap approach. We concentrate on local excitations constrained to the defect, which means the system is a $1d$ defect CFT with $\mathfrak{osp}(4^*|2)$…
We study conformal metrics with prescribed Gaussian curvature on surfaces with conical singularities and geodesic boundary in supercritical regimes. Exploiting a variational argument, we derive a general existence result for surfaces with…
Recently a prescription to compute the four-dimensional N = 2 superconformal index in the presence of certain BPS surface defects has been given. These surface defects are labelled by symmetric representations of SU(N). In the present paper…
We study a class of interface conformal field theories obtained by taking a large $N$ CFT and turning on a relevant double-trace deformation over half space. At low energies, this leads to a conformal interface separating two CFTs which are…
Partition functions for M2-brane theories in various backgrounds are computed. We consider in particular configurations of membranes at orbifold singularities preserving N=5 or N=6 supersymmetry. The worldvolume membrane theory for some of…
We use the 5-sphere partition functions of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories to explore the (2,0) superconformal theory on S^5 x S^1. The 5d theories can be regarded as Scherk-Schwarz reductions of the 6d theory along the circle. In a…
There are two major ways of constructing 4d $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal field theories (SCFTs): the first one is putting a 6d $(2,0)$ theory on a punctured Riemann surface (class-S theory), and the second one is putting type IIB string…
The nematic-superconductor state is an example of a quantum liquid crystal that breaks gauge as well as rotation invariance. It was conjectured to exist in the pseudogap regime of the cuprates high $T_c$ superconductors. The…
Type IIB string theory admits Janus solutions connecting $\text{AdS}_5$ vacua. These geometries correspond to interface conformal field theories and are naturally described in five-dimensional supergravity as $\text{AdS}_4$ foliations over…
In this note we present a solution of $N=4,d=7$ gauged supergravity which is holographically dual to a co-dimension two defect living in a six dimensional SCFT. The solution is obtained by double analytic continuation of a two charge…
We study the finite part of the sphere partition function of d-dimensional Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) as a function of exactly marginal couplings. In odd dimensions, this quantity is physical and independent of the exactly marginal…
We study the low energy effective action of the $\Omega$-deformed $\mathcal N =2^{*}$ $SU(2) $ gauge theory. It depends on the deformation parameters $\epsilon_{1},\epsilon_{2}$, the scalar field expectation value $a$, and the…
We study mass deformations of certain three dimensional $\mathcal{N}=4$ Superconformal Field Theories (SCFTs) that have come to be called $T^\rho[G]$ theories. These are associated to tame defects of the six dimensional $(0,2)$ SCFT…
Recently proposed relation between conformal field theories in two dimensions and supersymmetric gauge theories in four dimensions predicts the existence of the distinguished basis in the space of local fields in CFT. This basis has a…
We show that the mechanism of vortex-antivortex pair production via field oscillations, earlier proposed by two of us for systems with first order transitions in presence of explicit symmetry breaking, is in fact very generally applicable.…
One can associate an invariant to a large class of regular codimension two defects of the six dimensional $(0,2)$ SCFT $\mathscr{X}[j]$ using the classical Springer correspondence. Such an association allows a simple description of…
The basic problem of shape complementarity analysis appears fundamental to applications as diverse as mechanical design, assembly automation, robot motion planning, micro- and nano-fabrication, protein-ligand binding, and rational drug…
We generalize recent construction of four-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ SCFT from wrapping six-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=(2,0)$ theory on a Riemann surface to the case of $D$-type with outer-automorphism twists. This construction allows us to…
A gauge invariant partition function is defined for gauge theories which leads to the standard quantization. It is shown that the descent equations and consequently the consistent anomalies and Schwinger terms can be extracted from this…
The partition function of type IIA and B strings on R^6xK3, in the T^4/Z_2 orbifold limit, is explicitly computed as a modular invariant sum over spin strutures required by perturbative unitarity in order to extend the analysis to include…