English

Current correlators in the Coulomb branch of N=4 SYM

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-10-31 v5

Abstract

We study correlators of R-symmetry currents in the Coulomb branch of N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theory in the large-N limit, using the AdS/CFT correspondence. In particular, we consider gauge fields in the presence of gravity and scalar fields parameterizing the coset SL(6,R)/SO(6) in the context of five-dimensional gauged supergravity. From a ten-dimensional point of view these backgrounds correspond to continuous D3-brane distributions. We find the surprising result that all 2-point functions of gauge currents fall into the same universality class, irrespectively of whether they correspond to broken or unbroken symmetries. We show that the problem of finding the spectrum can be mapped into an equivalent Schroedinger problem for supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The corresponding potential is the supersymmetric partner of the potential arising in studies of the spectrum for massless scalars and transverse graviton fluctuations in these backgrounds and the associated spectra are also identical. We discuss in detail two examples where these computations can be done explicitly as in the conformal case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0010048,
  title  = {Current correlators in the Coulomb branch of N=4 SYM},
  author = {Andreas Brandhuber and Konstadinos Sfetsos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0010048},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

LaTeX2e, 26 pages; v2: detailed explanations on the decoupling of scalars and gauge field fluctuations added, references; v5: in an addendum (in collaboration with D. Freedman and K. Skenderis) we demonstrate that the zero-mass poles found in the supergravity calculation are in agreement with field theory, thus resolving a puzzle in earlier versions of the paper