BPS Quivers of Five-Dimensional SCFTs, Topological Strings and q-Painlevé Equations

Abstract

AbstractWe study the discrete flows generated by the symmetry group of the BPS quivers for Calabi–Yau geometries describing five-dimensional superconformal quantum field theories on a circle. These flows naturally describe the BPS particle spectrum of such theories and at the same time generate bilinear equations of q-difference type which, in the rank one case, are q-Painlevé equations. The solutions of these equations are shown to be given by grand canonical topological string partition functions which we identify with $$\tau $$ τ -functions of the cluster algebra associated to the quiver. We exemplify our construction in the case corresponding to five-dimensional SU(2) pure super Yang–Mills and $$N_f=2$$ N f = 2 on a circle.