Surface Defects from Fractional Branes -- I

Abstract

We show that the Gukov-Witten monodromy defects of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory can be realized in perturbative string theory by considering an orbifold background of the Kanno-Tachikawa type and placing stacks of fractional D3-branes whose world-volume partially extends along the orbifold directions. In particular, we show that turning on a constant background value for some scalar fields in the closed string twisted sectors induces a non-trivial profile for the gauge field and one of the complex scalars of the world-volume theory, and that this profile exactly matches the singular behavior that one expects for a Gukov-Witten surface defect in the $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. To keep the presentation as simple as possible, in this work we restrict our analysis to surface defects corresponding to a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ orbifold and defer the study of the most general case to a companion paper.

30 pages; added arXiv number of the companion paper

References in corpus (7)

• Spacetime Instanton Corrections in 4D String Vacua - The Seesaw Mechanism for D-Brane Models
• Instanton counting with a surface operator and the chain-saw quiver
• Bubbling Surface Operators And S-Duality
• Surface operators, chiral rings, and localization in N=2 gauge theories
• Surface operators, dual quivers and contours
• Surface operators in N=2 SQCD and Seiberg Duality
• Surface Defects from Fractional Branes -- II

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Analytic bootstrap for the localized magnetic field
• Conformal dispersion relations for defects and boundaries
• Surface Operators in Superspace