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Infrared computations of defect Schur indices

  • Clay Córdova
  • , Davide Gaiotto
  • , Shu Heng Shao
  • Institute for Advanced Studies
  • Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

95 Scopus citations

Abstract

We conjecture a formula for the Schur index of four-dimensional N= 2 theories in the presence of boundary conditions and/or line defects, in terms of the low-energy effective Seiberg-Witten description of the system together with massive BPS excitations. We test our proposal in a variety of examples for SU(2) gauge theories, either conformal or asymptotically free. We use the conjecture to compute these defect-enriched Schur indices for theories which lack a Lagrangian description, such as Argyres-Douglas theories. We demonstrate in various examples that line defect indices can be expressed as sums of characters of the associated two-dimensional chiral algebra and that for Argyres-Douglas theories the line defect OPE reduces in the index to the Verlinde algebra.

Original languageEnglish
Article number106
JournalJournal of High Energy Physics
Volume2016
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 1 2016

Keywords

  • Conformal and W Symmetry
  • Supersymmetric gauge theory
  • Wilson, ’t Hooft and Polyakov loops

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