Twisted circle compactifications of 6d SCFTs
Lakshya Bhardwaj, Patrick Jefferson, Hee‐Cheol Kim, Houri-Christina Tarazi, Cumrun Vafa
Abstract
A bstract We study 6 d superconformal field theories (SCFTs) compactified on a circle with arbitrary twists. The theories obtained after compactification, often referred to as 5 d Kaluza-Klein (KK) theories, can be viewed as starting points for RG flows to 5 d SCFTs. According to a conjecture, all 5 d SCFTs can be obtained in this fashion. We compute the Coulomb branch prepotential for all 5 d KK theories obtainable in this manner and associate to these theories a smooth local genus one fibered Calabi-Yau threefold in which is encoded information about all possible RG flows to 5 d SCFTs. These Calabi-Yau threefolds provide hitherto unknown M-theory duals of F-theory configurations compactified on a circle with twists. For certain exceptional KK theories that do not admit a standard geometric description we propose an algebraic description that appears to retain the properties of the local Calabi-Yau threefolds necessary to determine RG flows to 5 d SCFTs, along with other relevant physical data.