Related papers: Aspects of emergent geometry in the AdS/CFT contex…
In this paper three notions of emergent geometry arising from the study of gauge/gravity duals are discussed. The unifying theme behind these notions of emergent geometry is that one can derive properties of the effective action of a probe…
Two dimensional N=(4,4) gauge theories flow to interacting superconformal field theories on their Higgs branch. We examine worldsheet instantons in these theories through the eyes of a D-brane construction. The effective instanton partition…
We study numerically various wave functions in a gauged matrix quantum mechanics of six commuting hermitian $N\times N$ matrices. Our simulations span ranges of $N$ up to 10000. This system is a truncated and quenched version of N=4 SYM…
It is of interest to find criteria on a 2d CFT which indicate that it gives rise to emergent gravity in a macroscopic 3d AdS space via holography. Symmetric orbifolds in the large $N$ limit have partition functions which are consistent with…
We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study flows of N=4 SYM to non-conformal theories. The dual geometries can be seen as sourced by a Wigner's semicircle distribution of D3 branes. We consider two cases, the first case corresponds to a…
We relate four-dimensional mass parameters to the positions of AdS 4-brane intersections in six-dimensional AdS spacetime. The 4-branes wrap 1-cycles on the rectangular toroidal orbifold T2/(Z2)3, are situated upon and parallel to the fixed…
We study the global geometry of a general class of spacetimes of relevance to the supersymmetric $AdS_3/CFT_2$ correspondence in eleven-dimensional supergravity. Specifically, we study spacetimes admitting a globally-defined…
Encouraged by the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study emergent local geometry in large N multi-matrix models from the perspective of a strong coupling expansion. By considering various solvable interacting models we show how the emergence or…
In this thesis I review various aspects of the AdS_4/CFT_3 correspondence, where AdS_4 supergravity arises from compactification of M-theory on a coset space G/H and preserves N<8 supersymmetries. One focal point of my review is that the…
We discuss geometric aspects of orbifold conformal field theories in the moduli space of N=(4,4) superconformal field theories with central charge c=6. Part of this note consists of a summary of our earlier results on the location of these…
Topological phases of matter in (2+1) dimensions are commonly equipped with global symmetries, such as electric-magnetic duality in gauge theories and bilayer symmetry in fractional quantum Hall states. Gauging these symmetries into local…
We review the role of integrability in the planar spectral problem of four-dimensional superconformal gauge theories besides N=4 SYM. The cases considered include the Leigh-Strassler marginal deformations of N=4 SYM, quiver theories which…
We study exactly marginal deformations of 3d $\mathcal{N}=2$ CFTs dual to AdS$_4$ solutions in eleven-dimensional supergravity using generalised geometry. Focussing on Sasaki-Einstein backgrounds, we find that marginal deformations…
We study the gravity duals of symmetry-breaking deformations of superconformal field theories, AdS/CFT dual to Type IIB string theory on AdS_5 x Y where Y is a Sasaki-Einstein manifold. In these vacua both conformal invariance and baryonic…
We analyse the classical moduli spaces of supersymmetric vacua of 3d N=2 Chern-Simons quiver gauge theories. We show quite generally that the moduli space of the 3d theory always contains a baryonic branch of a parent 4d N=1 quiver gauge…
We study how the geometry of the large extra dimensions may affect field theory results on a three-brane. More specifically, we compare cross sections for graviton emission from a brane when the internal space is a N-torus and a N-sphere…
This thesis is devoted to the construction of theories describing the consistent propagation of (super)conformal higher-spin fields on curved three- and four-dimensional (super)spaces. In the first half of this thesis we systematically…
In these lecture notes we first assemble the basic ingredients of supersymmetric gauge theories (particularly N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory), supergravity, and superstring theory. Brane solutions are surveyed. The geometry and symmetries of…
In this thesis, the AdS/CFT correspondence is used as a tool to explore novel AdS$_5$ Supergravity backgrounds (containing five-dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime) and their dual (four dimensional) Conformal Field Theory descriptions. In…
The dynamics of an N=4 spinning particle in a curved background is described using the N=4 superfield formalism. The $SU(2)_{local}\times SU(2)_{global}$ N=4 superconformal symmetry of the particle action requires the background to be a…