The general M5-brane superconformal index

Abstract: We calculate and study the general superconformal index for the 6d U(N) (2,0) theory with four chemical potentials, from the indices of gauge theories on CP^2 x R. Our index agrees with the large N supergravity index on AdS_7 x S^4 at low energies, and also yields the negative 'Casimir energy' with an N^3 scaling which was recently calculated from a QFT on S^5. Our approach also suggests a systematic study of the (1,0) superconformal indices.