Twisting with a Flip (the Art of Pestunization)

Abstract

We construct $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on 4D manifolds with a Killing vector field with isolated fixed points. It turns out that for every fixed point one can allocate either instanton or anti-instanton contributions to the partition function, and that this is compatible with supersymmetry. The equivariant Donaldson-Witten theory is a special case of our construction. We present a unified treatment of Pestun's calculation on $S^4$ and equivariant Donaldson-Witten theory by generalizing the notion of self-duality on manifolds with a vector field. We conjecture the full partition function for a $\mathcal{N}=2$ theory on any 4D manifold with a Killing vector. Using this new notion of self-duality to localize a supersymmetric theory is what we call "Pestunization".

58 pages, typos corrected, the final version to appear in CMP