Home
Scholarly Works
Infrared computations of defect Schur indices
Journal article

Infrared computations of defect Schur indices

Abstract

We conjecture a formula for the Schur index of four-dimensional N=2$$ \mathcal{N}=2 $$ 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.

Authors

Córdova C; Gaiotto D; Shao S-H

Journal

Journal of High Energy Physics, Vol. 2016, No. 11,

Publisher

Springer Nature

Publication Date

November 1, 2016

DOI

10.1007/jhep11(2016)106

ISSN

1126-6708

Contact the Experts team