Deformations of WA,D,E SCFTs
Emily Nardoni (UCSD)
In this talk, I'll discuss aspects of theories with superpotentials given by Arnold's A,D,E singularities, particularly the novelties that arise when the fields are matrices. We'll focus on 4d N=1 variants of susy QCD, with U(Nc) or SU(Nc) gauge group, Nf fundamental flavors, and adjoint matter fields X and Y appearing in WA,D,E(X,Y) superpotentials, but many of these considerations also apply in other possible contexts for matrix-variable WA,D,E. The 4d WA,D,E SQCD-type theories RG flow to superconformal field theories, and there are proposed duals in the literature for the WA_k, WD_k, and WE_7 cases. As I'll review, the WD_{even} and WE_7 duals rely on a conjectural, quantum truncation of the chiral ring. I'll describe our attempts to explore these issues by considering various deformations of the WA,D,E superpotentials, and the resulting RG flows and IR theories. Rather than finding supporting evidence for the quantum truncation and WD_{even} and WE_7 duals, we note some challenging evidence to the contrary.