Adding Flavor to AdS4/CFT3

TL;DR

This paper explores adding flavor fields to the ABJM theory in AdS4/CFT3, analyzing supersymmetric brane embeddings in supergravity and their field theory couplings, with detailed examples of various codimension flavors.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic method to incorporate flavor fields into the ABJM theory and studies their supersymmetric embeddings in supergravity, providing explicit examples and physical interpretations.

Findings

Identified supersymmetric probe brane embeddings for various flavor types.

Developed a general method to determine flavor couplings in the field theory.

Explored physical equivalences of brane embeddings in M-theory.

Abstract

Aharony, Bergman, Jafferis, and Maldacena have proposed that the low-energy description of multiple M2-branes at a C4/Zk singularity is a (2+1)-dimensional N=6 supersymmetric U(Nc) x U(Nc) Chern-Simons matter theory, the ABJM theory. In the large-Nc limit, its holographic dual is supergravity in AdS4 x S7/Zk. We study various ways to add fields that transform in the fundamental representation of the gauge groups, i.e. flavor fields, to the ABJM theory. We work in a probe limit and perform analyses in both the supergravity and field theory descriptions. In the supergravity description we find a large class of supersymmetric embeddings of probe flavor branes. In the field theory description, we present a general method to determine the couplings of the flavor fields to the fields of the ABJM theory. We then study four examples in detail: codimension-zero N=3 supersymmetric flavor, described in supergravity by Kaluza-Klein monopoles or D6-branes; codimension-one N=(0,6) supersymmetric chiral flavor, described by D8-branes; codimension-one N=(3,3) supersymmetric non-chiral flavor, described by M5/D4-branes; codimension-two N=4 supersymmetric flavor, described by M2/D2-branes. Finally we discuss special physical equivalences between brane embeddings in M-theory, and their interpretation in the field theory description.