String Theory Journal Club

The supersymmetric index of so-called quiver gauge theories (whose matter content can be expressed in terms of quivers) often admits an interesting large N factorization in terms of loops of the quiver. In this talk I discuss some techniques and results on the asymptotic degeneracy of the large N index for some such theories in 4d, and some recent developments on the so-called "giant graviton expansion" of the underlying U(N) matrix model.