Romans-mass-driven flows on the D2-brane

TL;DR

This paper explores how adding Romans mass influences the flow of D2-branes to superconformal phases using holographic duality, revealing a variety of supersymmetric domain walls connecting different phases.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of supersymmetric domain walls driven by Romans mass in D2-brane holography, including new analytic results for specific flows.

Findings

Existence of supersymmetric domain walls interpolating between D2-brane and superconformal phases.

Construction of domain walls with both endpoints being superconformal.

Analytic results for the SU(3)×U(1)-invariant flow into an N=2 conformal phase.

Abstract

The addition of supersymmetric Chern-Simons terms to ${\cal N}=8$ super-Yang-Mills theory in three-dimensions is expected to make the latter flow into infrared superconformal phases. We address this problem holographically by studying the effect of the Romans mass on the D2-brane near-horizon geometry. Working in a consistent, effective four-dimensional setting provided by $D=4$ ${\cal N}=8$ supergravity with a dyonic $\textrm{ISO(7)}$ gauging, we verify the existence of a rich web of supersymmetric domain walls triggered by the Romans mass that interpolate between the (four-dimensional description of the) D2-brane and various superconformal phases. We also construct domain walls for which both endpoints are superconformal. While most of our results are numerical, we provide analytic results for the $\textrm{SU}(3)\times \textrm{U}(1)$-invariant flow into an ${\cal N}=2$ conformal phase recently discovered.