Duality cascades and duality walls

Abstract

We recast the phenomenon of duality cascades in terms of the Cartan matrix associated to the quiver gauge theories appearing in the cascade. In this language, Seiberg dualities for the different gauge factors correspond to Weyl reflections. We argue that the UV behavior of different duality cascades depends markedly on whether the Cartan matrix is affine ADE or not. In particular, we find examples of duality cascades that can't be continued after a finite energy scale, reaching a "duality wall", in terminology due to M. Strassler. For these duality cascades, we suggest the existence of a UV completion in terms of a little string theory.