A dessin on the base: a description of mutually non-local 7-branes without using branch cuts

We study quiver gauge theories on D7-branes wrapped over vanishing holomorphic 4-cycles. We investigate how to incorporate O7-planes and/or flavor D7-branes, which are necessary to cancel anomalies. These theories are chiral, preserve four supercharges and exhibit very rich infrared dynamics. Geometric transitions and duality in the presence of O-planes are analyzed. We study the Higgs branch of these quiver theories, showing the emergence of fuzzy internal dimensions. This b...

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We compute the elliptic genus of the D1/D7 brane system in flat space, finding a non-trivial dependence on the number of D7 branes, and provide an F-theory interpretation of the result. We show that the JK-residues contributing to the elliptic genus are in one-to-one correspondence with coloured plane partitions and that the elliptic genus can be written as a chiral correlator of vertex operators on the torus. We also study the quantum mechanical system describing D0/D6 bound...

We propose a new geometric mechanism for naturally realizing unparallel three families of flavors in string theory, using the framework of F-theory. We consider a set of coalesced local 7-branes of a particular Kodaira singularity type and allow some of the branes to bend and separate from the rest, so that they meet only at an intersection point. Such a local configuration can preserve supersymmetry. Its matter spectrum is investigated by studying string junctions near the i...

We argue that a special step in the chain of dualities used in [Tan 2008] implicitly suggests to view Langlands duality as being fundamentally rooted in an eight-dimensional theory on the F-theory 7- brane. We give further arguments why such an eight-dimensional per- spective might be of interest.

Dessin d'Enfants on elliptic curves are a powerful way of encoding doubly-periodic brane tilings, and thus, of four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories whose vacuum moduli space is toric, providing an interesting interplay between physics, geometry, combinatorics and number theory. We discuss and provide a partial classification of the situation in genera other than one by computing explicit Belyi pairs associated to the gauge theories. Important also is the role of the...

In this paper, we apply recent methods of localized GLSMs to make predictions for Gromov-Witten invariants of noncommutative resolutions, as defined by e.g. Kontsevich, and use those predictions to examine the connectivity of the SCFT moduli space. Noncommutative spaces, in the present sense, are defined by their sheaves, their B-branes. Examples of abstract CFT's whose B-branes correspond with those defining noncommutative spaces arose in examples of abelian GLSMs describing...

We present evidence for a new class of strongly coupled N = 1 superconformal field theories (SCFTs) motivated by F-theory GUT constructions. These SCFTs arise from D3-brane probes of tilted seven-branes which undergo monodromy. In the probe theory, this tilting corresponds to an N = 1 deformation of an N = 2 SCFT by a matrix of field-dependent masses with non-trivial branch cuts in the eigenvalues. Though these eigenvalues characterize the geometry, we find that they do not u...

In this paper we show that counting Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants is universal in the sense that some other enumerative problems are either special cases or directly related to it. Such results provide concrete examples that support a proposal made in the paper to study various dualities from the point of view of group actions on the moduli space of theories. Connections to differential equations of hypergeometric type can be made transparent from this approach, suggesting...

We consider Yukawa couplings generated by a configuration of intersecting seven-branes in F-theory. In configurations with a single interaction point and no fluxes turned on, the Yukawa matrices have rank one. This is no longer true when the three-form H-flux is turned on, which is generically the case for F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau fourfolds. In the presence of H-fluxes, the Yukawa coupling is computed using a non-commutative deformation of holomorphic Chern-Si...