Symmetry-breaking vacua and baryon condensates in AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper explores the gravity duals of symmetry-breaking deformations in superconformal field theories within the AdS/CFT framework, analyzing moduli spaces, symmetry breaking, and baryon condensates.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the supergravity moduli space and links baryon operator condensates to Euclidean D3-brane partition functions.

Findings

Identification of Goldstone bosons for baryonic symmetry breaking

Matching of supergravity moduli space with gauge theory vacuum space

Proposal relating baryon condensates to D3-brane partition functions

Abstract

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 symmetries are spontaneously broken. We present a detailed discussion of the supergravity moduli space, which involves flat form fields on asymptotically conical Calabi-Yau manifolds, and match this to the gauge theory vacuum moduli space. We discuss certain linearised fluctuations of the moduli, identifying the Goldstone bosons associated with spontaneous breaking of non-anomalous baryonic symmetries. The remaining moduli fields are related to spontaneous breaking of anomalous baryonic symmetries. We also elaborate on the proposal that computing condensates of baryon operators is equivalent to computing the partition function of a non-compact Euclidean D3-brane in the background supergravity solution, with fixed boundary conditions at infinity.