Related papers: Twisting E8 Five-Branes
The physics of M5 branes placed near an M9 plane on an A-type ALE singularity exhibits a variety of phenomena that introduce additional massless degrees of freedom. There are tensionless strings whenever two M5 branes coincide or whenever…
We describe configurations of 5-branes and 7-branes which realize, when compactified on a circle, new isolated four-dimensional N=2 superconformal field theories recently constructed by Gaiotto. Our diagrammatic method allows to easily…
We study the Higgs branch of 5d superconformal theories engineered from brane webs with orientifold five-planes. We propose a generalization of the rules to derive magnetic quivers from brane webs pioneered in arXiv:2004.04082, by analyzing…
In this work, we significantly expand the web of T-dualities among heterotic NS5-brane theories with eight supercharges. This is achieved by introducing twists involving outer automorphisms of discrete gauge/flavor factors and tensor…
M5 branes on a D-type ALE singularity display various phenomena that introduce additional massless degrees of freedom. The M5 branes are known to fractionate on a D-type singularity. Whenever two fractional M5 branes coincide, tensionless…
We study five-dimensional minimally supersymmetric gauge theory compactified on a torus down to three dimensions, and its embedding into string/M-theory using geometric engineering. The moduli space on the Coulomb branch is hyperkaehler…
An intriguing class of 6d supersymmetric theories are known as little strings theories, which exhibit a rich network of T-dualities. A robust feature of these theories are their Higgs branches. Focusing on the little string theories that…
We study five-dimensional supersymmetric field theories with one-dimensional Coulomb branch. We extend a previous analysis which led to non-trivial fixed points with $E_n$ symmetry ($E_8$, $E_7$, $E_6$, $E_5=Spin(10)$, $E_4=SU(5)$,…
D3 branes in the vicinity of an E6, E7, or E8 stack of 7-branes in flat space are known to host at low energy a famous class of strongly-coupled N = 2 superconformal field theories featuring exceptional global symmetry. What if, instead,…
We show how the topological string partition function, which is known to capture the degeneracies of a gas of BPS spinning M2-branes in M-theory compactified to 5 dimensions, is related to a 4-dimensional D-brane system that consists of…
We consider M-theory in the presence of M parallel M5-branes probing a transverse A_{N-1} singularity. This leads to a superconformal theory with (1,0) supersymmetry in six dimensions. We compute the supersymmetric partition function of…
We study a family of 2d N=(0,4) gauge theories which describes at low energy the dynamics of E-strings, the M2-branes suspended between a pair of M5 and M9 branes. The gauge theory is engineered using a duality with type IIA theory, leading…
Magnetic quivers have led to significant progress in the understanding of gauge theories with 8 supercharges at UV fixed points. For a given low-energy gauge theory realised via a Type II brane construction, there exist magnetic quivers for…
We consider Dirichlet p-branes in type II string theory on a space which has been toroidally compactified in d dimensions. We give an explicit construction of the field theory description of this system by putting a countably infinite…
Orbifold compactification of heterotic E8 x E8 string theory is a source for promising grand unified model building. It can accommodate the successful aspects of grand unification while avoiding problems like doublet-triplet splitting in…
We describe a mechanism for localising branes in ambient space. When a 3-form flux is turned on in a Taub-NUT space, an M5-brane gets an effective potential that pins it to the center of the space. A similar effect occurs for M2-branes and…
We consider the 6d superconformal field theory realized on M5-branes probing the $E_8$ end-of-the-world brane on the deformed and resolved $\mathbb{C}^2/\mathbb{Z}_k$ singularity. We give an explicit algorithm which determines, for…
It is known that if we compactify D0-branes on a torus with constant B-field, the resulting theory becomes SYM theory on a noncommutative dual torus. We discuss the extension to the case of a H-field background. In the case of constant…
Abelian gerbes and twisted bundles describe the topology of the NS-NS 3-form gauge field strength H. We review how they have been usefully applied to study and resolve global anomalies in open string theory. Abelian 2-gerbes and twisted…
M5-branes on an ADE singularity are described by certain six-dimensional "conformal matter" superconformal field theories. Their Higgs moduli spaces contain information about various dynamical processes for the M5s; however, they are not…