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Published March 17, 2014 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

2d index and surface operators

Abstract

In this paper we compute the superconformal index of 2d (2, 2) supersymmetric gauge theories. The 2d superconformal index, a.k.a. flavored elliptic genus, is computed by a unitary matrix integral much like the matrix integral that computes the 4d superconformal index. We compute the 2d index explicitly for a number of examples. In the case of abelian gauge theories we see that the index is invariant under flop transition and under CY-LG correspondence. The index also provides a powerful check of the Seiberg-type duality for non-abelian gauge theories discovered by Hori and Tong. In the later half of the paper, we study half-BPS surface operators in N = 2 super-conformal gauge theories. They are engineered by coupling the 2d (2, 2) supersymmetric gauge theory living on the support of the surface operator to the 4d N = 2 theory, so that different realizations of the same surface operator with a given Levi type are related by a 2d analogue of the Seiberg duality. The index of this coupled system is computed by using the tools developed in the first half of the paper. The superconformal index in the presence of surface defect is expected to be invariant under generalized S-duality. We demonstrate that it is indeed the case. In doing so the Seiberg-type duality of the 2d theory plays an important role.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Article funded by SCOAP^3. Received: December 25, 2013. Accepted: February 20, 2014. Published: March 17, 2014. Available under Open Access. The authors would like to thank Yu Nakayama, Hirosi Ooguri, Pavel Putrov and Shlomo Razamat for interesting discussions. Authors are especially grateful to Anton Kapustin for his valuable comments. The work of A.G. is supported in part by the John A. McCone fellowship and by DOE Grant DE-FG02-92-ER40701. The work of S.G. is supported in part by DOE Grant DE-FG03-92-ER40701FG-02 and in part by NSF Grant PHY-0757647. Opinions and conclusions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of funding agencies.

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Published - art_10.1007_JHEP03_2014_080.pdf

Submitted - 1305.0266v2.pdf

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