Three-dimensional N=6 SCFT's and their membrane dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality between three-dimensional N=6 superconformal field theories and M-theory, analyzing moduli spaces, chiral operators, and giant magnons to understand the geometry and integrability properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed field theory analysis of M-theory duals, including moduli space, chiral rings, and dispersion relations, without relying on integrability assumptions.

Findings

Matching of D-brane states with M-theory geometry

Exact dispersion relation of giant magnons derived from field theory

Evidence for integrability of the spin chain at strong coupling

Abstract

We analyze several aspects of the recent construction of three-dimensional conformal gauge theories by Aharony et al. in various regimes. We pay special attention to understanding how the M-theory geometry and interpretation can be extracted from the analysis of the field theory. We revisit the calculations of the moduli space of vacua and the complete characterization of chiral ring operators by analyzing the field theory compactified on a 2-sphere. We show that many of the states dual to these operators can be interpreted as D-brane states in the weak coupling limit. Also, various features of the dual AdS geometry can be obtained by performing a strong coupling expansion around moduli space configurations, even though one is not taking the planar expansion. In particular, we show that at strong coupling the corresponding weak coupling D-brane states of the chiral ring localize on particular submanifolds of the dual geometry that match the M-theory interpretation. We also study the massive spectrum of fields in the moduli space. We use this to investigate the dispersion relation of giant magnons from the field theory point of view. Our analysis predicts the exact functional form of the dispersion relation as a function of the world-sheet momentum, independently of integrability assumptions, but not the exact form with respect to the 't Hooft coupling. We also get the dispersion relation of bound states of giant magnons from first principles, providing evidence for the full integrability of the corresponding spin chain model at strong 't Hooft coupling.