Abstract
We study Wilson surface defects in 6d \( \mathcal{N}=\left(2,0\right) \) superconformal field theories, engineered by semi-infinite M2-branes intersecting M5-branes. Two independent approaches are used to obtain the Wilson surface observables on the T2 inside Ω-deformed R4 × T2. One approach is to compute 5d \( \mathcal{N}={1}^{*} \) instanton partition functions in the presence of Wilson lines, where the instanton corrections capture the 6d Kaluza-Klein momentum modes. The other approach is to study the elliptic genera of 2d \( \mathcal{N}=\left(0,4\right) \) gauge theories, which we propose as describing 6d self-dual strings in the presence of Wilson surface defects. We make a detailed comparison between these two independent computations, which precisely agree for Wilson surfaces in minuscule representations; for non-minuscule representations instead we only find partial agreement, due to technical problems which we comment about.
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Agarwal, P., Kim, J., Kim, S. et al. Wilson surfaces in M5-branes. J. High Energ. Phys. 2018, 119 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2018)119
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2018)119