CERN Accelerating science

Article
Report number	arXiv:2205.03411 ; CERN-TH 2022-074 ; DESY-22-069
Title	6D SCFTs, center-flavor symmetries, and Stiefel-Whitney compactifications
Author(s)	Heckman, Jonathan J. (Pennsylvania U.) ; Lawrie, Craig (DESY) ; Lin, Ling (CERN) ; Zhang, Hao Y. (Pennsylvania U.) ; Zoccarato, Gianluca (Leuven U.)
Publication	2022-09-07
Imprint	2022-05-06
Number of pages	69
In:	Phys. Rev. D 106 (2022) 066003
DOI	10.1103/PhysRevD.106.066003 (publication)
Subject category	Particle Physics - Theory
Abstract	The center-flavor symmetry of a gauge theory specifies the global form of consistent gauge and flavor bundle background field configurations. For 6d gauge theories which arise from a tensor branch deformation of a superconformal field theory (SCFT), we determine the global structure of such background field configurations, including possible continuous Abelian symmetry and R-symmetry bundles. Proceeding to the conformal fixed point, this provides a prescription for reading off the global form of the continuous factors of the zero-form symmetry, including possible non-trivial mixing between flavor and R-symmetry. As an application, we show that this global structure leads to a large class of 4d $\mathcal{N} = 2$ SCFTs obtained by compactifying on a $T^2$ in the presence of a topologically non-trivial flat flavor bundle characterized by a 't Hooft magnetic flux. The resulting "Stiefel--Whitney twisted" compactifications realize several new infinite families of 4d $\mathcal{N} = 2$ SCFTs, and also furnish a 6d origin for a number of recently discovered rank one and two 4d $\mathcal{N} = 2$ SCFTs.
Copyright/License	publication: © 2022-2024 authors (License: CC BY 4.0), sponsored by SCOAP³ preprint: (License: arXiv nonexclusive-distrib 1.0)

Corresponding record in: Inspire