From Diamond Gaugings to Dualisations

TL;DR

This paper explores how coupling six-dimensional holomorphic Chern-Simons theories can generate gaugings across various models in twistor space, revealing a gauge structure that extends to generic data and applying it to $mbda$-deformations.

Contribution

It reformulates the coupling mechanism in Cartan geometry, demonstrating its general applicability and clarifying the nature of the resulting 2D theories as non-Abelian duals.

Findings

The gauge structure extends to generic meromorphic data.

Coupling induces gaugings of $mbda$-models with flatness constraints.

Resulting 2D theories are non-Abelian duals, not standard gauged models.

Abstract

We revisit the proposal that coupling two six-dimensional holomorphic Chern-Simons theories generates gaugings throughout the twistor-space diamond relating 6d hCS, 4d self-dual Yang-Mills, 4d Chern-Simons, and 2d integrable models. In previous work this mechanism was demonstrated only in a special case, leaving its general status unclear. By reformulating the construction in the language of Cartan geometry, we expose the underlying gauge structure and show that the argument extends to generic choices of meromorphic data. We then apply this to the pole structure that yields the well-studied $\lambda$-deformations of the WZW model. The coupled 6d system indeed induces gaugings of the associated $\lambda$-models, but necessarily introduces Lagrange multipliers enforcing flatness of the gauged connection. The resulting two-dimensional theories are therefore non-Abelian dualisations rather than ordinary gauged $\lambda$-models.