Twisted circle compactification of N = 4 SYM and its holographic dual

by Ricardo Stuardo

Wednesday 9 Oct 2024, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

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We consider a compactification of 4D N = 4 SYM, with SU(N) gauge group, on a circle with anti-periodic boundary conditions for the fermions. We couple the theory to a constant background gauge field along the circle for an abelian subgroup of the R-symmetry which allows to preserve four supersymmetries. The 3D effective theory exhibits gapped and ungapped phases, which we argue are holographically dual, respectively, to a supersymmetric soliton in AdS5×S5 and a particular quotient of AdS5×S5. The gapped phase corresponds to an IR 3D N = 2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills-Chern-Simons theory at level N, while the ungapped phase is naturally identified with the root of a Higgs branch in the 3D theory. We discuss the extension of the twisting procedure to maximally SUSY Yang-Mills theories in different dimensions, obtaining the relevant duals for 2D and 6D, and comment on the odd dimensional cases.