RG domain walls and hybrid triangulations

This paper studies the interplay between the $\mathcal{N} = 2$ gauge theories in three and four dimensions that have a geometric description in terms of twisted compactification of the six-dimensional $(2,0)$ SCFT. Our main goal is to construct the three-dimensional domain walls associated to any three-dimensional cobordism. We find that we can build a variety of 3d theories that represent the local degrees of freedom at a given domain wall in various 4d duality frames, including both UV S-dual frames and IR Seiberg-Witten electric-magnetic dual frames. We pay special attention to Janus domain walls, defined by four-dimensional Lagrangians with position-dependent couplings. If the couplings on either side of the wall are weak in different UV duality frames, Janus domain walls reduce to S-duality walls, i.e. domain walls that encode the properties of UV dualities. If the couplings on one side are weak in the IR and on the other weak in the UV, Janus domain walls reduce to RG walls, i.e. domain walls that encode the properties of RG flows. We derive the 3d geometries associated to both types of domain wall, and test their properties in simple examples, both through basic field-theoretic considerations and via comparison with quantum Teichmüller theory. Our main mathematical tool is a parametrization and quantization of framed at $SL(K)$ connections on these geometries based on ideal triangulations.

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Published 5 February 2015