Modular properties of surface operators in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 2 SU(2) SQCD

Abstract

Abstract We study half-BPS surface operators in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 supersymmetric QCD in four dimensions with gauge group SU(2) and four fundamental flavours. We compute the twisted chiral superpotential that describes the effective theory on the surface operator using equivariant localization as well as the Seiberg-Witten data. We then use the constraints imposed by S-duality to resum the instanton contributions to the twisted superpotential into elliptic functions and (quasi-) modular forms. The resummed results match what one would obtain from the description of surface operators as the insertion of a degenerate operator in a spherical conformal block in Liouville CFT.