The NS five-brane partition sum

Abstract

This note is the written version of a talk which was presented at the Cargese 2002 summer school. It gives a brief introduction to the paper hep-th/0205281, written in collaboration with R. Dijkgraaf and E. Verlinde. In this paper, we calculate the euclidean partition function of the type IIA NS five-brane wrapped on an arbitrary Calabi-Yau space in a double-scaling decoupling limit and in the presence of a flat RR 3-form background field. The result is the product of a theta function, coming from the classical fluxes of the self-dual tensor field, and a factor representing the quantum contributions. The quantum factor turns out to be related to topological B-model string amplitudes, and both factors satisfy a holomorphic anomaly equation. The result can teach us more about little string theories and about instanton corrections to four-dimensional effective quantities.