Surface Operators and Separation of Variables

Alday, Gaiotto, and Tachikawa conjectured relations between certain 4d N=2 supersymmetric field theories and 2d Liouville conformal field theory. We study generalizations of these relations to 4d theories with surface operators. For one type of surface operators the corresponding 2d theory is the WZW model, and for another type - the Liouville theory with insertions of extra degenerate fields. We show that these two 4d theories with surface operators exhibit an IR duality, which reflects the known relation (the so-called separation of variables) between the conformal blocks of the WZW model and the Liouville theory. Furthermore, we trace this IR duality to a brane creation construction relating systems of M5 and M2 branes in M-theory. Finally, we show that this duality may be expressed as an explicit relation between the generating functions for the changes of variables between natural sets of Darboux coordinates on the Hitchin moduli space.

Baxters Relations and Spectra of Quantum Integrable Models

Generalized Baxters relations on the transfer-matrices (also known as Baxters TQ relations) are constructed and proved for an arbitrary untwisted quantum affine algebra. Moreover, we interpret them as relations in the Grothendieck ring of the category O introduced by Jimbo and the second author in arXiv:1104.1891 involving infinite-dimensional representations constructed in arXiv:1104.1891, which we call here prefundamental. We define the transfer-matrices associated to the prefundamental representations and prove that their eigenvalues on any finite-dimensional representation are polynomials up to a universal factor. These polynomials are the analogues of the celebrated Baxter polynomials. Combining these two results, we express the spectra of the transfer-matrices in the general quantum integrable systems associated to an arbitrary untwisted quantum affine algebra in terms of our generalized Baxter polynomials. This proves a conjecture of Reshetikhin and the first author formulated in 1998 (arXiv:math/9810055). We also obtain generalized Bethe Ansatz equations for all untwisted quantum affine algebras.