Novel wall-crossing behaviour in rank one $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 2* gauge theory

Abstract

We study the BPS spectrum of four-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with gauge group SU(2) and a massive adjoint hypermultiplet, which has an extremely intricate structure with infinite spectrum in all chambers of its Coulomb moduli space, and is not well understood. We build on previous results by employing the BPS quiver description of the spectrum, and explore the qualitative features in detail using numerical techniques. We find novel and unexpected behaviour in the form of wall-crossings involving interactions between BPS particles with negative electric-magnetic pairings, which we interpret in terms of the reverse orderings of the usual wall-crossing formulas for rank one $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 field theories. This identifies new a priori unrelated states in the spectrum.