Freezing and BPS jumping

A bstract We report a novel BPS jumping phenomenon of 5d N = 1 supersymmetric gauge theories whose brane configuration is equipped with an O7-plane. The study of the relation between O7 + -plane and O7 − -plane reveals that such BPS jumps take place when the Higgsing is triggered near the O7-plane upon a particular parameter tuning of the theories. We propose two types of gauge theories whose BPS spectra jump. One is the SU(2 N + 8) gauge theory with a symmetric hypermultiplet converted to the SU(2 N ) gauge theory with an antisymmetric hypermultiplet. The other is pure SO(2 N + 8) gauge theory jumping to pure Sp( N ) gauge theory. We explicitly confirm our proposal through the (un)refined instanton partition functions. Furthermore, we discuss feasible generalizations involving an O p -plane for supersymmetric gauge theories of eight supercharges in four and three dimensions ( p = 6, 5 respectively).