Type IIB construction of flavoured ABJ(M) and fractional M2 branes

Understand

We study type IIB brane configurations engineering 3d flavoured ABJ(M) theories with Yang-Mills kinetic terms, which flow to IR fixed points describing M2 branes at a class of toric Calabi-Yau fourfold singularities.

• The type IIB construction provides a bridge between M-theory geometry and field theory, and allows to identify the superconformal field theories with fixed quiver diagram, Chern-Simons levels and superpotential, differing by the ranks of the gauge groups, which we associate to dual AdS_4\timesY_7 backgrounds of M-theory without or with torsion G-fluxes sourced by fractional M2 branes in Y_7, when Y_7 is smooth.
• The analysis includes the Q^{1,1,1} and Y^{1,2}(CP^2) geometries.
• We also comment on duality cascades and on the interplay between torsion G-fluxes in M-theory and partial resolutions.