Vertices, vortices & interacting surface operators

We show that the vortex moduli space in non-abelian supersymmetric N = (2, 2) gauge theories on the two dimensional plane with adjoint and anti-fundamental matter can be described as an holomorphic submanifold of the instanton moduli space in four dimensions. The vortex partition functions for these theories are computed via equivariant localization. We show that these coincide with the field theory limit of the topological vertex on the strip with boundary conditions corresponding to column diagrams. Moreover, we resum the field theory limit of the vertex partition functions in terms of generalized hypergeometric functions formulating their AGT dual description as interacting surface operators of simple type. Analogously we resum the topological open string amplitudes in terms of q-deformed generalized hypergeometric functions proving that they satisfy appropriate finite difference equations.