A generic half-BPS surface defect of ${mathcal N}=4$ supersymmetric U$(N)$ Yang-Mills theory is described by a partition of $N = n_1 + ldots + n_M$ and a set of $4M$ continuous parameters. We show that such a defect can be realized by $n_I$ stacks of
fractional D3-branes in Type II B string theory on a $mathbb{Z}_M$ orbifold background in which the brane world-volume is partially extended along the orbifold directions. In this set up we show that the $4M$ continuous parameters correspond to constant background values of certain twisted closed string scalars of the orbifold. These results extend and generalize what we have presented for the simple defects in a previous paper.
We show that the Gukov-Witten monodromy defects of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory can be realized in perturbative string theory by considering an orbifold background of the Kanno-Tachikawa type and placing stacks of fractional D3-branes whose world
-volume partially extends along the orbifold directions. In particular, we show that turning on a constant background value for some scalar fields in the closed string twisted sectors induces a non-trivial profile for the gauge field and one of the complex scalars of the world-volume theory, and that this profile exactly matches the singular behavior that one expects for a Gukov-Witten surface defect in the $mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. To keep the presentation as simple as possible, in this work we restrict our analysis to surface defects corresponding to a $mathbb{Z}_2$ orbifold and defer the study of the most general case to a companion paper.
