Five-Brane Configurations without a Strong Coupling Regime

TL;DR

This paper explores five-brane configurations that avoid strong coupling issues, analyzing their geometry, stability, and holographic properties, including gravitational fluctuations and stress tensor correlators in little string theory.

Contribution

It introduces new five-brane configurations with high symmetry and no strong coupling problems, providing exact solutions and holographic calculations.

Findings

Existence of normalizable bulk graviton modes with a mass gap

Explicit solutions for brane distributions with unbroken supersymmetry

Calculation of stress tensor two-point functions in little string theory

Abstract

Five-brane distributions with no strong coupling problems and high symmetry are studied. The simplest configuration corresponds to a spherical shell of branes with S^3 geometry and symmetry. The equations of motions with delta-function sources are carefully solved in such backgrounds. Various other brane distributions with sixteen unbroken supercharges are described. They are associated to exact world-sheet superconformal field theories with domain-walls in space-time. We study the equations of gravitational fluctuations, find normalizable modes of bulk 6-d gravitons and confirm the existence of a mass gap. We also study the moduli of the configurations and derive their (normalizable) wave-functions. We use our results to calculate in a controllable fashion using holography, the two-point function of the stress tensor of little string theory in these vacua.