English

Type IIB Supergravity Action and Holography

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-03-23 v2

Abstract

In the prototypical AdS5_5/CFT4_4 correspondence, the free energy of N=4\mathcal{N}=4 SU(N)(N) 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 AdS5×S5AdS_5\times S^5 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 AdS5×S5AdS_5\times S^5 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 AdS4AdS_4 SS-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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:27:03.904Z