Type IIB Supergravity Action and Holography
Abstract
In the prototypical AdS/CFT correspondence, the free energy of SU super Yang-Mills theory is commonly reproduced from the Euclidean on-shell action of five-dimensional gauged supergravity -- a consistent truncation of Type IIB supergravity -- rather than computed directly in ten dimensions. A longstanding obstacle to the latter is that the conventional Type IIB pseudo-action evaluated on the background vanishes identically, apparently precluding a first-principles holographic comparison. A recent proposal by Kurlyand and Tseytlin, based on the Pasti-Sorokin-Tonin formulation, resolves this issue for a special class of backgrounds including the vacuum by introducing a topological term required for consistency, yielding a non-vanishing on-shell value in agreement with holography. In this work we extend this refinement to a broader class of Type IIB backgrounds by introducing a generalized topological correction under milder conditions, encompassing AdS geometries of generic dimension and non-vanishing 2-form potentials. We test the proposal on non-trivial solutions such as the Lunin-Maldacena background and the -fold solution, and find agreement with the corresponding lower-dimensional gauged supergravity on-shell actions and thereby with the expected holographic observables. Our results place direct holographic comparisons within the ten-dimensional Type IIB framework on firmer ground.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.18248,
title = {Type IIB Supergravity Action and Holography},
author = {Soumya Adhikari and Junho Hong and Chanyoung Joung and Geum Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18248},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
v1: 33 pages; v2: minor corrections