Physics Letters B 761 (2016) 261–264
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
A duality web of linear quivers
Frederic Brünner
a,∗
, Vyacheslav P. Spiridonov
b
a
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
b
Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, JINR, Dubna, Moscow region, 141980, Russia
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
15 June 2016
Received
in revised form 17 August 2016
Accepted
19 August 2016
Available
online 24 August 2016
Editor:
N. Lambert
We show that applying the Bailey lemma to elliptic hypergeometric integrals on the A
n
root system leads
to a large web of dualities for N = 1 supersymmetric linear quiver theories. The superconformal index
of Seiberg’s SQCD with SU(N
c
) gauge group and SU(N
f
) × SU(N
f
) × U (1) flavour symmetry is equal
to that of N
f
− N
c
− 1distinct linear quivers. Seiberg duality further enlarges this web by adding new
quivers. In particular, both interacting electric and magnetic theories with arbitrary N
c
and N
f
can be
constructed by quivering an s-confining theory with N
f
= N
c
+1.
© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
Supersymmetric gauge theories are a highly active subject of
study and many discoveries were made in this field in the past
decades. One particularly interesting phenomenon is duality: for
certain strongly coupled supersymmetric quantum field theories,
there exist weakly coupled dual theories that describe the same
physical system in terms of different degrees of freedom. A famous
example is Seiberg duality [1] for N = 1 supersymmetric quantum
chromodynamics (SQCD), where two dual theories, referred to as
electric and magnetic, flow to the same infrared (IR) theory. While
such dualities are hard to prove, supersymmetric theories allow
for the definition of observables that are independent of the de-
scription,
i.e. they should yield the same result on both sides of
the duality. One such quantity is the superconformal index (SCI)
[2,3], which counts the number of BPS states of a given theory. It
turns out that SCIs are related to elliptic hypergeometric functions,
which have also found many other applications in physics.
A
long hunt for the most general possible exactly solvable
model of quantum mechanics has led to the discovery of ellip-
tic
hypergeometric integrals forming a new class of transcendental
special functions [4]. In the first physical setting these integrals
served either as a normalization condition of particular eigenfunc-
tions
or as eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian of an integrable
Calogero–Sutherland type model [5]. The Bailey lemma for such
integrals [6] appeared to define the star-triangle relation associ-
ated
with quantum spin chains [7]. However, a major physical
application was found by Dolan and Osborn [8] who showed that
certain elliptic hypergeometric integrals are identical to SCIs of 4d
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: bruenner@hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at (F. Brünner),
spiridon@theor.jinr.ru (V.P. Spiridonov).
supersymmetric field theories and that Seiberg duality can be un-
derstood
in terms of symmetries of such integrals. In [9], many
explicit examples were studied. In the present work, we describe a
web of dualities that can be constructed using the Bailey lemma
of [6] and [10]. Starting from a known elliptic beta integral on
the A
n
root system [11] that is identified with the star-triangle
relation, one gets an algorithm for constructing an infinite chain
of symmetry transformations for elliptic hypergeometric integrals.
The emerging integrals can be interpreted as the SCIs of linear
quiver gauge theories, a possibility that was already mentioned
in [9].
Quiver
gauge theories are theories with product gauge groups
that arise as world volume theories of branes placed on singular
spaces or from brane intersections [12–14]. Their field content can
be depictured by so-called quiver diagrams; all new theories dis-
cussed
in this article are of this type. Note that while the quivers
we discuss are also linear like those described in [15], field content
and flavour symmetries are different.
This
letter is dedicated to applying an integral extension of the
standard Bailey chains techniques [16] to SCIs. We identify the
star-triangle relation (a variant of the Yang–Baxter equation) with
an elliptic hypergeometric integral on the A
n
root system that cor-
responds
to the superconformal index of an s-confining N = 1
SU
(N
c
) gauge theory. The main result of our calculation is that the
SCI of SQCD with SU(N
c
) gauge group and SU(N
f
) × SU(N
f
) ×
U (1) flavour symmetry is equal to that of N
f
−N
c
−1distinct lin-
ear
quivers. Seiberg duality leads to magnetic partners for these
quivers, some of which are again dual to yet other quivers. In to-
tal,
this leads to a very large duality web, composed of Seiberg
and Bailey lemma dualities. An example of such a web correspond-
ing
to the electric SQCD with N
c
= 3 and N
f
= 6is illustrated in
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2016.08.039
0370-2693/
© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.