Wild Wall Crossing and BPS Giants

These notes are based on work done in collaboration with Frank Ferrari. We show how to determine the spectra of stable BPS states in $N=2$ supersymmetric $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theories that are asymptotically free, i.e. without and with $N_f=1,2,3$ quark hypermultiplets. In all cases: $\bullet$ There is a curve of marginal stability diffeomorphic to a circle and going through all (finite) singular points of moduli space. $\bullet$ The BPS spectra are discontinuous across these c...

We study N=(2,2) supersymmetric abelian gauge theories in two dimensions. The exact BPS spectrum of these models is shown to coincide with the spectrum of massive hypermultiplets of certain N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories in four dimensions. A special case of these results involves a surprising connection between four-dimensional N=2 SQCD with N colours and N_{f}>N flavours at the root of the baryonic Higgs branch and the supersymmetric CP^{2N-N_{f}-1} sigma-model in two di...

We explicitly determine the global structure of the $SL(2,Z)$ bundle over the Coulomb branch of the moduli space of asymptotically free $N=2$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories with gauge group $SU(2)$ when massless hypermultiplets are present. For each relevant number of flavours, we show that there is a curve of marginal stability on the Coulomb branch, diffeomorphic to a circle, across which the BPS spectrum is discontinuous. We determine rigorously and completely the BPS ...

The weak coupling spectrum of BPS saturated states of pure $N=2$ supersymmetric SU$(n)$ gauge theory is investigated. The method uses known results on the dyon spectrum of the analogous theory with $N=4$ supersymmetry, along with the action on these states of the semi-classical monodromy transformations. For dyons whose magnetic charge is not a simple root of the Lie algebra, it is found that the weak coupling region is divided into a series of domains, for which the dyons ha...

We consider the two complex dimensional moduli space of supersymmetric vacua for low energy effective N=2 SYM with gauge group SU(3). We describe, at the topological level, a consistent model of how the relevant curves of marginal stability (CMS) intertwine with the branch cuts to partition the moduli space into pieces carrying different BPS spectra. At strong coupling we find connected cores which carry a smaller BPS spectrum than that at weak coupling. At the strongest coup...

We demonstrate that $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric non-Abelian gauge theories have towers of BPS particles obeying a Regge relation, $J \sim m^{2},$ between their angular momenta, $J,$ and their masses, $m$. For $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theories, we estimate the slope of these Regge trajectories using a non-relativistic quiver quantum mechanics model. Along the way, we also prove various structure theorems for the quiver moduli spaces that appear in the calculation.

We study spectrum of D=2 N=(2,2) QED with N+1 massive charged chiral multiplets, with care given to precise supermultiplet countings. In the infrared the theory flows to CP^N model with twisted masses, where we construct generic flavored kink solitons for the large mass regime, and study their quantum degeneracies. These kinks are qualitatively different and far more numerous than those of small mass regime, with features reminiscent of multi-pronged (p,q) string web, complet...

BPS quivers for N=2 SU(N) gauge theories are derived via geometric engineering from derived categories of toric Calabi-Yau threefolds. While the outcome is in agreement of previous low energy constructions, the geometric approach leads to several new results. An absence of walls conjecture is formulated for all values of N, relating the field theory BPS spectrum to large radius D-brane bound states. Supporting evidence is presented as explicit computations of BPS degeneracies...

We study BPS saturated domain walls in supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theories in the large N limit. We focus on the Seiberg-Witten regime of ${\cal N}=2$ theory perturbed by a small mass ($m<O(\Lambda/N^4)$) and determine the wall profile by numerically minimizing its energy density. Similar to the SU(2) wall studied in a previous work, the SU(N) wall has a five layer structure, with two confinement phases on the outside, a Coulomb phase in the middle and two transition reg...

We study systematically the BPS spectra of N=2 SYM coupled to half--hypermultiplets, the basic example being E_7 SYM coupled to a half--hyper in the 56 irrepr. In order to do this, we determine the BPS quivers with superpotential of such N=2 models using a new technique we introduce. The computation of the BPS spectra in the various chambers is then reduced to the Representation Theory of the resulting quivers. We use the quiver description to study the BPS spectrum at both s...