The String dual of a confining four-dimensional gauge theory

By J. Polchinski, M. Strassler. 2000

670 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study N=1 gauge theories obtained by adding finite mass terms to N=4 Yang-Mills theory. The Maldacena dual is nonsingular: in each of the many vacua, there is an extended brane source, arising from Myers' dielectric effect. The source consists of one or more (p,q) 5-branes. In particular, the confining vacuum contains an NS5-brane; the confining flux tube is a fundamental string bound to the 5-brane. The system admits a simple quantitative description as a perturbation of a state on the N=4 Coulomb branch. Various nonperturbative phenomena, including flux tubes, baryon vertices, domain walls, condensates and instantons, have new, quantitatively precise, dual descriptions. We also briefly consider two QCD-like theories. Our method extends to the nonsupersymmetric case. As expected, the N=4 matter cannot be decoupled within the supergravity regime.

Subfields: Geometry and Topology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8f3340c58d92a649b01372023a3e02576664c33

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In Geometry and Topology

1. R. Myers
2. E. Witten
3. C. Vafa
4. T. Takayanagi
5. R. Dijkgraaf
6. D. Berenstein
7. Marcos Mariño
8. Joaquim Gomis

Citations in the corpus

• Holographic Renormalization (2001, background): “To name a few: geometries that are singular from the 5d point of view may be nonsingular from the 10d point of view; each of the KK towers is represented by a single field, and more importantly some of the gravity/gauge theory dualities, such as the Polchinski-Strassler duality [55], are formulated ”
• M-Theory Dynamics On A Manifold Of G_2 Holonomy (2001, methodology): “A rough analogy is to a recent framework [58] for studying the same model (for the An case) in the AdS/CFT correspondence.”
• M(atrix) Theory: Matrix Quantum Mechanics as a Fundamental Theory (2001, methodology): “This dielectric effect has been used in the work of Polchinski and Strassler (2000) on string duals of super Yang-Mills theories with reduced supersymmetry, and in the work of McGreevy, Susskind, and Toumbas (2000) on giant gravitons in AdS space.”
• Flux-induced SUSY-breaking soft terms (2003, background): “the appearance of non-commuting scalar vevs, and hence the polarization of the D3- branes into spherical 5-branes [30, 31 ].”
• Wormholes in AdS (2004, background): “It could be that the fivebranes that appear in flat space [29] will also appear here and disconnect the two asymptotic regions.”
• Quantum Black Holes as Holograms in AdS Braneworlds (2002, neutral): “For instance, a singularity appears when supersymmetry is broken to produce either a confining phase or a mass gap at some finite scale in the infrared, and its resolution is an interesting problem [46].”
• Meson spectroscopy from holomorphic probes on the warped deformed conifold (2004, background): “2.1 The deformed conifold and the embedding z4 = µ 4 2.2 The 10d metric and the forms in the KS background 8 2.3 The dual gauge theory 9 3. κ-symmetry 10”
• A Perturbative Window into Non-Perturbative Physics (2002, background): “In the context of AdS/CFT dualities this deformation was studied in [41].”
• Moduli stabilization from fluxes in a simple IIB orientifold (2002, background): “It would be interesting to determine the leading nontrivial effects of the fluxes on the D-branes, and to find more elaborate types of models where phenomena reminiscent of those observed in [30] can occur.”
• Superstars and giant gravitons (2001, background): “These solutions asymptotically approach AdS5×S5 and carry internal ‘angular’ momentum on the five-sphere.”
• Strings in flat space and pp waves from N = 4 Super Yang Mills (2002, methodology): “The situation seems similar to the one encountered in the analysis of vacua of mass deformed N = 4 Yang Mills done by Polchinski and Strassler [33].”
• An N =2 Supersymmetric Membrane Flow (2001, neutral): “July, 2001”
• Towards strange metallic holography (2009, background): “One mechanism by which singularities are resolved in string theory is brane polarization [61, 62], where a brane wrapped on the would be singularity expands to a finite radius due to the potential from form fields, and screens the diverging fields.”