On the defect group of a 6D SCFT (Q295869)

The authors study the defect group for all known six-dimensional super conformal field theories (SCFT). The defect group is a data intrinsic to the SCTF and measures the surface defect charges which are not screened by dynamical strings. If the defect group is non-trivial, they show that it is the abelianization of the discrete subgroup of \(\mathrm{U}(2)\) which appears in the classification of 6-dimensional SCTFs realized in \(F\)-theory. Some results were known for \((2,0)\) SCFTs. In the last part of the paper the authors explain how the defect group specifies defining data in the compactification of a \((1,0)\) SCFT.