(Un)Higgsing the M2-brane

We study various aspects of N = 2 quiver-Chern-Simons theories, conjectured to be dual to M2-branes at toric Calabi-Yau four-fold singularities, under Higgsing. In particular we study in detail the orbifold ℂ 4/ ℤ 32, obtaining a number of different quiver-Chern-Simons phases for this model, and all 18 toric partial resolutions thereof. In the process we develop a general un-Higgsing algorithm that allows one to construct quiver-Chern-Simons theories by blowing up, thus obtaining a plethora of new models. In addition we explain how turning on torsion G-flux non-trivially affects the supergravity dual of Higgsing, showing that the supergravity and field theory analyses precisely match in an example based on the Sasaki-Einstein manifold Y 1,2(ℂℙ 2). © SISSA 2010