Reflexions on Mahler: Dessins, Modularity and Gauge Theories

Quivers, gauge theories and singular geometries are of great interest in both mathematics and physics. In this note, we collect a few open questions which have arisen in various recent works at the intersection between gauge theories, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. The questions originate from the study of supersymmetric gauge theories in different dimensions with different supersymmetries. Although these constitute merely the tip of a vast iceberg, we hope th...

F-theory is perhaps the most general currently available approach to study non-perturbative string compactifications in their geometric, large radius regime. It opens up a wide and ever-growing range of applications and connections to string model building, quantum gravity, (non-perturbative) quantum field theories in various dimensions and mathematics. Its computational power derives from the geometrisation of physical reasoning, establishing a deep correspondence between fu...

We consider an application of Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants to the theory of the sixth Painlev\'e and Gauss hypergeometric functions: two classical special functions of the isomonodromy type. It is shown that, higher order transformations and the Schwarz table for the Gauss hypergeometric function are closely related with some particular Belyi functions. Moreover, we introduce a notion of deformation of the dessins d'enfants and show that one dimensional deformations are a...

Branes at a $\mathbb{F}_0$ singularity give rise to two different toric quiver gauge theories, which are related by Seiberg duality. We study where in the K\"ahler moduli space each of them is physically realized.

A "dessin d'enfant" is a graph embedded on a two-dimensional oriented surface named by Grothendieck. Recently we have developed a new way to keep track of non-localness among 7-branes in F-theory on an elliptic fibration over $P^1$ by drawing a triangulated "dessin" on the base. To further demonstrate the usefulness of this method, we provide three examples of its use. We first consider a deformation of the $I_0^*$ Kodaira fiber. With a dessin, we can immediately find out whi...

We show how to map Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants to algebraic curves as Seiberg-Witten curves, then use the mirror map and the AGT map to obtain the corresponding 4d $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric instanton partition functions and 2d Virasoro conformal blocks. We explicitly demonstrate the 6 trivalent dessins with 4 punctures on the sphere. We find that the parametrizations obtained from a dessin should be related by certain duality for gauge theories. Then we will discuss...

Talk at the International Conference ``G\'eom\'etrie au vingti\`eme ci\`ecle: 1930--2000'', Paris, Institut Henri Poincar\'e, Sept. 2001. The title is a homage to Hans Rademacher and Otto Toeplitz whose book fascinated the author many years ago.

We propose a programme for systematically counting the single and multi-trace gauge invariant operators of a gauge theory. Key to this is the plethystic function. We expound in detail the power of this plethystic programme for world-volume quiver gauge theories of D-branes probing Calabi-Yau singularities, an illustrative case to which the programme is not limited, though in which a full intimate web of relations between the geometry and the gauge theory manifests herself. We...

We study the metrics on the families of moduli spaces arising from probing with a brane the ten and eleven dimensional supergravity solutions corresponding to renormalisation group flows of supersymmetric large n gauge theory. In comparing the geometry to the physics of the dual gauge theory, it is important to identify appropriate coordinates, and starting with the case of SU(n) gauge theories flowing from N=4 to N=1 via a mass term, we demonstrate that the metric is Kahler,...

The full moduli space M of a class of N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories is studied. For gauge theories living on a stack of D3-branes at Calabi-Yau singularities X, M is a combination of the mesonic and baryonic branches, the former being the symmetric product of X. In consonance with the mathematical literature, the single brane moduli space is called the master space F. Illustrating with a host of explicit examples, we exhibit many algebro-geometric properties of the master...