Abstract
We show that the Gukov-Witten monodromy defects of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory can be realized in perturbative string theory by considering an orbifold background of the Kanno-Tachikawa type and placing stacks of fractional D3-branes whose world-volume partially extends along the orbifold directions. In particular, we show that turning on a constant background value for some scalar fields in the closed string twisted sectors induces a non-trivial profile for the gauge field and one of the complex scalars of the world-volume theory, and that this profile exactly matches the singular behavior that one expects for a Gukov-Witten surface defect in the \( \mathcal{N} \) = 4 super Yang-Mills theory. To keep the presentation as simple as possible, in this work we restrict our analysis to surface defects corresponding to a ℤ2 orbifold and defer the study of the most general case to a companion paper.
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Ashok, S., Billò, M., Frau, M. et al. Surface defects from fractional branes. Part I. J. High Energ. Phys. 2020, 51 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2020)051
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2020)051