A landscape of field theories

Abstract

Studying a quantum field theory involves a choice of space-time manifold and a choice of background for any global symmetries of the theory. We argue that many more choices are possible when specifying the background. In the context of branes in string theory, the additional data corresponds to a choice of supergravity tensor fluxes. We propose the existence of a landscape of field theory backgrounds, characterized by the space-time metric, global symmetry background and a choice of tensor fluxes. As evidence for this landscape, we study the supersymmetric six-dimensional (2, 0) theory compactified to two dimensions. Different choices of metric and flux give rise to distinct two-dimensional theories, which can preserve differing amounts of supersymmetry.