The Higgs branch of heterotic ALE instantons

Authors: Michele Del Zotto, Marco Fazzi, Suvendu Giri Preprint number: UUITP-11/23 Abstract: We begin a study the Higgs branches of the six-dimensional (1,0) little string theories (LSTs) governing the worldvolumes of heterotic ALE instantons. We give a description of such spaces by constructing the corresponding magnetic quivers. The latter are three-dimensional N=4 quiver gauge theories that flow in the infrared to 3d fixed points whose quantum corrected Coulomb branches are the Higgs branches of the six-dimensional theories of interest. We present results for both types of Heterotic strings, and mostly for ℂ²/ℤ_k ALE spaces. Our analysis is valid both in the absence and in the presence of small instantons. Along the way, we also describe small SO(32) instanton transitions in terms of the corresponding magnetic quivers, which parallels a similar treatment of the small instanton transitions in the context of the E₈ × E₈ heterotic string.