Instantons from blow-up

Abstract

We generalize Nakajima-Yoshioka blowup equations to arbitrary gauge group with hypermultiplets in arbitrary representations. Using our blowup equations, we compute the instanton partition functions for 4d N = 2 and 5d N = 1 gauge theories for arbitrary gauge theory with a large class of matter representations, without knowing explicit construction of the instanton moduli space. Our examples include exceptional gauge theories with fundamentals, SO(N) gauge theories with spinors, and SU(6) gauge theories with rank-3 antisymmetric hypers. Remarkably, the instanton partition function is completely determined by the perturbative part.