The String Dual of a Confining Four-Dimensional Gauge Theory

TL;DR

This paper explores the gravity dual of a confining four-dimensional gauge theory derived from N=4 Yang-Mills, revealing detailed nonperturbative phenomena and extending the analysis to nonsupersymmetric cases.

Contribution

It provides a detailed string theory dual description of confining gauge theories with new insights into nonperturbative effects and extends the framework to nonsupersymmetric theories.

Findings

Nonsingular supergravity dual with extended brane sources

Quantitative descriptions of flux tubes, baryon vertices, and domain walls

Extension of methods to nonsupersymmetric theories

Abstract

We study N=1 gauge theories obtained by adding finite mass terms to N=4 Yang-Mills theory. The Maldacena dual is nonsingular: in each of the many vacua, there is an extended brane source, arising from Myers' dielectric effect. The source consists of one or more (p,q) 5-branes. In particular, the confining vacuum contains an NS5-brane; the confining flux tube is a fundamental string bound to the 5-brane. The system admits a simple quantitative description as a perturbation of a state on the N=4 Coulomb branch. Various nonperturbative phenomena, including flux tubes, baryon vertices, domain walls, condensates and instantons, have new, quantitatively precise, dual descriptions. We also briefly consider two QCD-like theories. Our method extends to the nonsupersymmetric case. As expected, the N=4 matter cannot be decoupled within the supergravity regime.