Defects, nested instantons and comet-shaped quivers (Q829946)

In four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories, surface defects are real codimension two submanifolds where a specific reduction of the gauge connection takes place. They were pioneered by \textit{G. 't Hooft} [Nucl. Phys. B 153, 141--160 (1979; \url{doi:10.1016/0550-3213(79)90595-9})] in the classification of the phases of gauge theories and introduced in mathematics by \textit{P. B. Kronheimer} and \textit{T. S. Mrowka} [Topology 34, No. 1, 37--97 (1995; Zbl 0832.57011)] in the study of Donaldson invariants. In this paper, the authors introduce and study surface defects supporting nested instantons with respect to the parabolic reduction of the gauge group at the defect. These defects are engineered from a D7/D3 brane system on a local compact complex surface. Specifically, they consider the product \(S=T^2\times C\) of a 2-torus \(T^2\) and a Riemann surface \(C\) with punctures \(\{p_i\}\) and embed it into CY 5-fold \(T^2\times T^*C\times \mathbb{C}^2\). Here surface operators are located at \(T^2\times \{p_i\}\). Supersymmetric partition functions of these systems provide conjectural formulae for virtual invariants of the moduli spaces. Mathematically, they obtain for a single D7-brane conjectural explicit formulae for the virtual equivariant elliptic genus of a certain bundle over the moduli space of the nested Hilbert scheme of points on the affine plane. Connections to Vafa-Witten theory and Donaldson-Thomas theory of CY 4-folds are also mentioned.