The Seiberg-Witten Kahler Potential as a Two-Sphere Partition Function

TL;DR

This paper shows that the Seiberg-Witten Kahler potential for 4D N=2 SU(2) Super-Yang-Mills theory can be exactly obtained from a two-sphere partition function of a related Calabi-Yau model, linking gauge theory and string theory techniques.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Seiberg-Witten Kahler potential can be derived from two-sphere partition functions, extending the geometric approach to gauge theories via Calabi-Yau manifolds.

Findings

Exact Kahler potential obtained from two-sphere partition function.

Method applies to 4D N=2 SU(2) Super-Yang-Mills theory.

Potential generalization to other gauge theories.

Abstract

Recently it has been shown that the two-sphere partition function of a gauged linear sigma model of a Calabi-Yau manifold yields the exact quantum Kahler potential of the Kahler moduli space of that manifold. Since four-dimensional N=2 gauge theories can be engineered by non-compact Calabi-Yau threefolds, this implies that it is possible to obtain exact gauge theory Kahler potentials from two-sphere partition functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Seiberg-Witten Kahler potential can indeed be obtained as a two-sphere partition function. To be precise, we extract the quantum Kahler metric of 4D N=2 SU(2) Super-Yang-Mills theory by taking the field theory limit of the Kahler parameters of the O(-2,-2) bundle over P1 x P1. We expect this method of computing the Kahler potential to generalize to other four-dimensional N=2 gauge theories that can be geometrically engineered by toric Calabi-Yau threefolds.