Flops of any length, Gopakumar-Vafa invariants, and 5d Higgs Branches

Abstract: The conifold is a basic example of a noncompact Calabi-Yau threefold that admits a simple flop, and in M-theory, gives rise to a 5d hypermultiplet at low energies, realized by an M2-brane wrapped on the vanishing sphere. We develop a novel gauge-theoretic method to construct new classes of examples that generalize the simple flop to so-called length l=1,...,6. The method allows us to naturally read off the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants. Although they share similar properties to the beloved conifold, these threefolds are expected to admit M2-bound states of higher degree. We demonstrate this through our computations of the GV invariants. Furthermore we fully characterize the associated Higgs branches by computing their dimensions and flavor groups. With our techniques we extract more refined data such as the charges of the hypers under the flavor group.