Ungauging Schemes and Coulomb Branches of Non-simply Laced Quiver Theories

Amihay Hanany, Anton Zajac

Published 2020-02-13Version 1

Three dimensional Coulomb branches have a prominent role in the study of moduli spaces of supersymmetric gauge theories with $8$ supercharges in $3,4,5$, and $6$ dimensions. Inspired by simply laced \3d supersymmetric quiver gauge theories, we consider Coulomb branches constructed from non-simply laced quivers with edge multiplicity $k$ and no flavor nodes. In a computation of the Coulomb branch as the space of dressed monopole operators, a center-of-mass $U(1)$ symmetry needs to be ungauged. Typically, for a simply laced theory, all choices of the ungauged $U(1)$ (i.e. all choices of \emph{ungauging schemes}) are equivalent and the Coulomb branch is unique. In this note, we study various ungauging schemes and their effect on the resulting Coulomb branch variety. It is shown that, for a non-simply laced quiver, inequivalent ungauging schemes exist which correspond to inequivalent Coulomb branch varieties. Ungauging on any of the long nodes of a non-simply laced quiver yields the same Coulomb branch $\mathcal{C}$. For choices of ungauging the $U(1)$ on a short node of rank higher than $1$, the GNO dual magnetic lattice deforms such that it no longer corresponds to a Lie group, and therefore, the monopole formula yields a non-valid Coulomb branch. However, if the ungauging is performed on a short node of rank $1$, the one-dimensional magnetic lattice is rescaled conformally along its single direction and the corresponding Coulomb branch is an orbifold of the form $\mathcal{C}/\mathbb{Z}_k$. Ungauging schemes of $3$d Coulomb branches provide a particularly interesting and intuitive description of a subset of actions on the nilpotent orbits studied by Kostant and Brylinski \cite{KB92}. The ungauging scheme analysis is carried out for minimally unbalanced $C_n$, affine $F_4$, affine $G_2$, and twisted affine $D_4^{(3)}$ quivers, respectively.