Holography and the Higgs branch of N=2 SYM theories

Abstract

We present a proposal for the description of the Higgs branch of four-dimensional N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We focus on a finite Sp(N) N=2 theory arising as dual of a configuration of N D3-branes in the vicinity of four D7-branes and an orientifold 7-plane in type I' string theory. The field theory contains hypermultiplets in the second rank anti-symmetric and in the fundamental representations. The Higgs branch has a dual description in terms of gauge field configurations with non-zero instanton number on the world-volume of the D7-branes. In this setting the non-renormalisation of the metric on the Higgs branch implies constraints on the alpha' corrections to the D7-brane effective action, including couplings to the curvature and five-form field strength. In the second part of the paper we discuss non-renormalisation properties of BPS Wilson lines, which are closely related to the physics of the Higgs branch. Using a formulation of the four-dimensional N=2 theory in terms of a three-dimensional N=2 superspace we show that the expectation value of certain Wilson-line operators with hypermultiplets at the end points is independent of the length and thus coincides with the expectation value of the local operators parametrising the Higgs branch.

arXiv commentLaTeX, 29 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor corrections, one reference added

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Cited by in corpus (29)

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• Holographic heavy-light mesons from non-Abelian DBI
• Spectral Flow on the Higgs Branch and AdS/CFT Duality
• Holographic flavor on the Higgs branch
• Adding flavour to the Polchinski-Strassler background
• Scalar effective potential for D7 brane probes which break chiral symmetry
• Isospin diffusion in thermal AdS/CFT with flavor
• Less is More: Non-renormalization Theorems from Lower Dimensional Superspace
• Chemical Potential in the Gravity Dual of a 2+1 Dimensional System
• Color Superconductivity in Holographic SYM Theory
• Hypermultiplet dependence of one-loop effective action in the $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal theories
• Moduli Spaces of Cold Holographic Matter
• Exact strong coupling results in $\mathcal{N}$=2 $Sp(2N)$ superconformal gauge theory from localization
• Strong Coupling Dynamics of the Higgs Branch: Rolling a Higgs by Collapsing an Instanton
• AdS/CFT Duality and the Higgs Branch of $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYM
• A Supersymmetric Color Superconductor from Holography
• Towards a Holographic Model of Color-Flavor Locking Phase
• Holographic flavour in the N=1 Polchinski-Strassler background
• Instantons on D7 brane probes and AdS/CFT with flavour
• Non-perturbative effects in the BMN limit of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills
• Unquenched flavor on the Higgs branch
• Twistor Strings with Flavour
• Quantum Field Theories Coupled to Supergravity: AdS/CFT and Local Couplings
• Spectrum of a Supersymmetric Color Superconductor
• Holographic flavor in the gauge/gravity duality
• Comments on the N=1 SU(M+p)xSU(p) quiver gauge theory with flavor
• Adding flavor on the Higgs branch