DESY/Hamburg U. String Theory Seminar

6d SCFTs and Their Compactifications

by Craig Lawrie (DESY)

Europe/Berlin
Description

Studying compactifications of 6d theories has led to a wealth of understanding about lower dimensional quantum field theories. A vast landscape of six-dimensional superconformal field theories with (1,0) supersymmetry have recently been shown to have geometric constructions. I shall review this construction and compare this landscape of 6d SCFTs obtained from geometry with the bounds that arise from the superconformal bootstrap. I will then discuss two different 6d origins for 4d superconformal field theories with N=2 supersymmetry. The first involves compactifying 6d (1,0) SCFTs on torus and the second origin is the Class S framework, where the 4d theories are obtained as compactifications of the 6d (2,0) SCFTs on punctured Riemann surfaces. I will demonstrate that a subset of 4d N=2 SCFTs can be obtained from both origins, and discuss the physical implications of such a plurality of origins.