Tetrahedron instantons (Q2149066)

This paper deals -- strictly from the point of view of String Theory -- with the study of \textit{tetrahedron instantons}, which are introduced by the authors. Physically, a tetrahedron instanton is realized by a D1-brane probing a configuration of intersecting D7-branes in flat spacetime with a constant \(B\)-field. In other words, they capture instantons in \(\mathbb{C}^3\) in the presence of the most general intersecting real codimension two supersymmetric defects. The paper is structured as follow. In the first part, the authors introduce tetrahedron instantons, which are a generalization of the intensively studied Yang-Mills instantons, which occur minimizing the Yang-Mills action on \(\mathbb{R}^4\). The authors give an ADHM-type construction of the moduli space of such instantons, describe its geometry and compute its virtual dimension. In the second part, the authors compute the instanton partition function in two ways; first, by equivariant localization on the corresponding moduli space, exploiting a suitable torus action induced by rotation of the \(\Omega\)-background. Second, they compute the partition function from the elliptic genus of the worldvolume theory on the D1-branes probing a configuration of D7-branes, and show that the two answers match. The authors remark that one may see tetrahedron instantons -- and their partition function -- sitting in between of instantons describing systems of D1-D7 branes (engineered by Donaldson-Thomas theory of Calabi-Yau 3-folds) and D1-D9 branes (engineered by Donaldson-Thomas theory of Calabi-Yau 4-folds), which is considered to be the mother of all instanton partition functions.