Homological S-Duality in 4d N=2 QFTs (1612.08065v1)

Abstract: The $S$-duality group $\mathbb{S}(\mathcal{F})$ of a 4d $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric theory $\mathcal{F}$ is identified with the group of triangle auto-equivalences of its cluster category $\mathscr{C}(\mathcal{F})$ modulo the subgroup acting trivially on the physical quantities. $\mathbb{S}(\mathcal{F})$ is a discrete group commensurable to a subgroup of the Siegel modular group $Sp(2g,\mathbb{Z})$ ($g$ being the dimension of the Coulomb branch). This identification reduces the determination of the $S$-duality group of a given $\mathcal{N}=2$ theory to a problem in homological algebra. In this paper we describe the techniques which make the computation straightforward for a large class of $\mathcal{N}=2$ QFTs. The group $\mathbb{S}(\mathcal{F})$ is naturally presented as a generalized braid group. The $S$-duality groups are often larger than expected. In some models the enhancement of $S$-duality is quite spectacular. For instance, a QFT with a huge $S$-duality group is the Lagrangian SCFT with gauge group $SO(8)\times SO(5)^3\times SO(3)^6$ and half-hypermultiplets in the bi- and tri-spinor representations. We focus on four families of examples: the $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs of the form $(G,G^\prime)$, $D_p(G)$, and $E_r^{(1,1)}(G)$, as well as the asymptotically-free theories $(G,\widehat{H})$ (which contain $\mathcal{N}=2$ SQCD as a special case). For the $E_r^{(1,1)}(G)$ models we confirm the presence of the $PSL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ $S$-duality group predicted by Del Zotto, Vafa and Xie, but for most models in this class $S$-duality gets enhanced to a much larger group.