Type IIB construction of flavoured ABJ(M) and fractional M2 branes
Abstract
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 AdS4×Y7 backgrounds of M-theory without or with torsion G-fluxes sourced by fractional M2 branes in Y7, when Y7 is smooth. The analysis includes the Q1,1,1 and Y1,2(CP2) geometries. We also comment on duality cascades and on the interplay between torsion G-fluxes in M-theory and partial resolutions.