N =1 Deformations and RG flows of N =2 SCFTs, part II: non-principal deformations

Abstract

We continue to investigate the N = 1 deformations of four-dimensional N = 2 superconformal field theories (SCFTs) labeled by a nilpotent element of the flavor symmetry [1]. This triggers a renormalization group (RG) flow to an N = 1 SCFT. We systematically analyze all possible deformations of this type for certain classes of N = 2 SCFTs: conformal SQCDs, generalized Argyres-Douglas theories and the E6SCFT. We find a number of examples where the amount of supersymmetry gets enhanced to N = 2 at the end point of the RG flow. Most notably, we find that the SU(N ) and Sp(N ) conformal SQCDs can be deformed to flow to the Argyres-Douglas (AD) theories of type (A1, D2N −1) and (A1, D2N) respectively. This RG flow therefore allows us to compute the full superconformal index of the (A1, DN) class of AD theories. Moreover, we find an infrared duality between N = 1 theories where the fixed point is described by an N = 2 AD theory. We observe that the classes of examples that exhibit supersymmetry enhancement saturate certain bounds for the central charges implied by the associated two-dimensional chiral algebra.