It was recently recognized that various observables in four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories can be computed for an arbitrary 't Hooft coupling as determinants of certain semi-infinite matrices. I will show that these quantities can be expressed as Fredholm determinants of the so-called Bessel kernel and they are closely related to celebrated Tracy-Widom distribution (more precisely,...
We consider a four-derivative extension of minimal gauged supergravity in five dimensions and use it to evaluate the on-shell action of AdS$_5$ black holes, showing that it fully matches the result from the superconformal index ``on the second sheet” after imposing supersymmetry. We then compute the corrected black hole thermodynamics and we find a formula of the BPS entropy as a function of...
Partition function and correlation functions of the topologically twisted $\mathcal{N} = 2$ super Yang-Mills theory on a smooth four-manifold with gauge group $SU(2)$, also known as Donaldson-Witten theory, provide us a way to compute topological invariants of many manifolds classifying their smooth structure (Donaldson invariants). Equivariantisation of this theory, on the one hand, can be...
In holographic CFTs it is interesting to study operators whose dimension scales as the central charge when the latter is taken to be large. As an example of such operators, I consider multi-particle states formed by a large number of BPS single-particle constituents. Focusing on the example of the (AdS_3 x S^3)/CFT_2 duality, I discuss how the gravitational backreaction of these heavy states...
Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet (EdGB) is a theory of modified gravity in which a dilaton-type scalar field is nonminimally coupled to quadratic curvature terms via an exponential function. Black holes (BHs) in this theory are particularly interesting since they possess a critical configuration with minimum mass and finite Hawking temperature. This means that a critical BH loses mass due to...
