Title: Discrete Relationship of Generalized and Mirror Symmetries

Speaker: Dr. Lakshya Bhardwaj

Affiliation: Oxford University, UK

Time: 16:00-17:00, Tuesday, 4th April, 2023 (UTC+8, Beijing Time)

Venue: Zoom Meeting (ID: 385 442 0225; Passcode: yauc)

Inviter: Marcus Sperling

Abstract  

The study of generalized global symmetries is related to the presence/absence of discrete structures in quantum field theory, e.g. the presence/absence of discrete gauge fields in the theory. In light of this, it is natural to ask if such discrete structures play a role in the celebrated examples of 3d N=4 mirror symmetry. That is, whether the believed 3d N=4 mirror pairs are precisely dual to each other, or rather they are dual only if one mods out extra coupled TQFTs. In this talk, I will discuss a series of recent papers with Mathew Bullimore, Andrea Ferrari and Sakura Schafer-Nameki, where we probed this problem in a variety of ways, which involved understanding global forms of Higgs branch and (IR enhanced) Coulomb branch symmetries, 1-form symmetries, and ‘t Hooft anomalies of these symmetries. We found all this information matched exactly across mirror pairs involving unitary and special unitary gauge groups, meaning that no discrete modification of mirror symmetry is needed in all these cases! This may be a good or a bad news, depending on one’s taste; however, in the process we uncovered fundamental conceptual relationships between the study of generalized global symmetries and anomalies on one hand, and the study of various types of monopole operators and associated monopole formulas on the other hand. Another application of our methods is the deduction of generalized symmetries and anomalies of higher-dimensional SCFTs using their magnetic quivers. Based on ArXiv: 2301.02249 and 2205.15330.

Speaker

Dr. Lakshya Bhardwaj obtained his PhD from Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. After a postdoc at Harvard University, he is currently a postdoc at Oxford University.