Intersecting Surface Defects and Two-Dimensional CFT

by Wolfger Peelaers (Rutgers)

Thursday 16 Mar 2017, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

SR1 (DESY Hamburg)

In this talk, I will introduce intersecting surface operators/defects in four-dimensional N = 2 supersymmetric quantum field theories. For a class of such defects, realized as intersecting M2-branes ending on N M5-branes wrapping the UV-curve, I will conjecture and provide evidence for an explicit equivalence between their expecatation value on the squashed four-sphere and correlation functions in Liouville/Toda CFT with the insertion of arbitrary degenerate vertex operators, which are labeled by two highest weights of SU(N). For interacting four-dimensional theories, like SQCD, I will provide a conjecture for the ADHM matrix integral computing the equivariant volume of the instanton moduli space in the presence of intersecting surface defects.