Modularity and 4D-2D spectral equivalences for large-N gauge theories with adjoint matter

Understand

In recent work, we demonstrated that the confined-phase spectrum of non-supersymmetric pure Yang-Mills theory coincides with the spectrum of the chiral sector of a two-dimensional conformal field theory in the large-$N$ limit.

• This was done within the tractable setting in which the gauge theory is compactified on a three-sphere whose radius is small compared to the strong length scale.
• In this paper, we generalize these observations by demonstrating that similar results continue to hold even when massless adjoint matter fields are introduced.
• These results hold for both thermal and $(-1)^F$-twisted partition functions, and collectively suggest that the spectra of large-$N$ confining gauge theories are organized by the symmetries of two-dimensional conformal field theories.