Atomic Higgsings of 6D SCFTs. Part I

A bstract In this paper, we study the full Higgs branch Hasse diagrams for any given 6d $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = (1 , 0) SCFTs constructed via F-theory. This can be done by a procedure of determining all the minimal Higgsings on the generalized quivers of the 6d SCFTs. We call this procedure the atomic Higgsing, which can be implemented iteratively. We present our general algorithm with many concrete examples of Hasse diagrams. We also compare our algorithm with the Higgsings determined by the 3d $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 4 magnetic quivers. For the cases where the magnetic quivers are unitary, we can reproduce the full Hasse diagrams. We also construct the orthosymplectic magnetic quivers from the Type IIA brane systems for some new examples. Our approach, based on F-theory, applies to the known and new orthosymplectic cases, as well as theories that do not have known descriptions in terms of magnetic quivers. We expect our geometry-based approach to help extend the horizon of the RG flows of the 6d SCFTs.