Equivariant Verlinde Algebra from Superconformal Index and Argyres–Seiberg Duality
Here, we show the equivalence between two seemingly distinct 2d TQFTs: one comes from the “Coulomb branch index” of the class \({{\mathcal S}}\) theory \({T[\Sigma,G]}\) on \({L(k,1) \times S^1}\) , the other is the \({^L G}\) “equivariant Verlinde formula”, or equivalently partition function of \({^L G_{\mathbb{C}}}\) complex Chern–Simons theory on \({\Sigma\times S^1}\) . We first derive this equivalence using the M-theory geometry and show that the gauge groups appearing on the two sides are naturally G and its Langlands dual \({^L G}\) . When G is not simply-connected, we provide a recipe of computing the index of \({T[\Sigma,G]}\) as summation over the indices of \({T[\Sigma,\tilde{G}]}\) with non-trivial background ’t Hooft fluxes, where \({\tilde{G}}\) is the universal cover of G . Then we check explicitly this relation between the Coulomb index and the equivariant Verlinde formula for \({G=SU(2)}\) or SO (3). In the end, as an application of this newly found relation, we consider the more general case where G is SU ( N ) or PSU ( N ) and show that equivariant Verlinde algebra can be derived using field theory via (generalized) Argyres–Seiberg duality. Furthermore, we attach a Mathematica notebook that can be used to compute the SU (3) equivariant Verlinde coefficients.