Witten indices of abelian M5 brane on ℝ× S5

Abstract

Witten indices and partition functions are computed for abelian 6d tensor and hypermultiplets on ℝ× S5 in Lorentzian signature in an R gauge field background which preserves some supersymmetry. We consider a general supersymmetric squashing that also admits squashing of the Hopf fiber. Wick rotation to Euclidean M5 brane amounts to Wick rotation of squashing parameters and the hypermultiplet mass parameter. We compute Casimir energies for tensor and hypermultiplets separately for general squashing, and match these with the corresponding gravitational anomaly polynomials. We extract Witten indices on ℝ× ℂℙ 2 and find that this is zero, again matching with the vanishing anomaly polynomial on an odd dimensional space.