Surface defects, the superconformal index and q-deformed Yang-Mills

TL;DR

This paper extends the computation of the 4D N=2 superconformal index to include arbitrary surface defects labeled by SU(N) representations and enhances the connection with q-deformed Yang-Mills theory.

Contribution

It provides a new prescription for calculating the superconformal index with general surface defects and broadens the existing dictionary linking the index to q-deformed Yang-Mills correlators.

Findings

Generalized the superconformal index computation to arbitrary SU(N) representations.

Extended the correspondence between the superconformal index and q-deformed Yang-Mills.

Provided explicit methods for incorporating surface defects into the index calculation.

Abstract

Recently a prescription to compute the four-dimensional N = 2 superconformal index in the presence of certain BPS surface defects has been given. These surface defects are labelled by symmetric representations of SU(N). In the present paper we give a prescription to compute the superconformal index in the presence of surface defects labelled by arbitrary representations of SU(N). Furthermore, we extend the dictionary between the N = 2 superconformal Schur-index and correlators of q-deformed Yang-Mills to incorporate such surface defects.