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We study theories of type D4 in class-S, with nonabelian outer-automorphism twists around various cycles of the punctured Riemann surface C. We propose an extension of previous formulæ for the superconformal index to cover this case and classify the SCFTs corresponding to fixtures (3-punctured spheres). We then go on to study families of SCFTs corresponding to once-punctured tori and 4-punctured spheres. These exhibit new behaviours, not seen in previous investigations. In particular, the generic theory with 4 punctures on the sphere from non-commuting Z2 twisted sectors has six distinct weakly-coupled descriptions. 

A bstract It is known that some theories of class S are actually factorized into multiple decoupled nontrivial four-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 theories. We propose a way of constructing examples of this phenomenon using the physics of half-BPS surface defects, and check that it works in one simple example: it correctly reproduces a known realization of two copies of $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 superconformal SU(2) QCD, describing this factorized theory as a class S theory of type A 3 on a five-punctured sphere with a twist line. Separately, we also present explicit checks that the Coulomb branch of a putative factorized class S theory has the expected product structure, in two examples. 

We construct a family of examples of pairs of 4d N = 2 SCFTs whose graded Coulomb branch dimensions, Weyl-anomaly coefficients and flavour symmetry algebras and levels coincide, but which are nonetheless distinct SCFTs. The difference (detectable by the superconformal index) can occur at arbitrarily high order. We argue that it is, however, reflected in a difference in the global form of the flavour symmetry groups.