Intersecting D3-branes and Holography

TL;DR

This paper explores a defect conformal field theory from intersecting D3-branes, analyzing its dual holographic description, classical fluctuations, and operator correspondence, with a focus on supersymmetry and non-renormalization properties.

Contribution

It provides an exact Lagrangian for the intersecting D3-branes defect CFT and establishes the holographic dual description including classical fluctuations and operator mappings.

Findings

Classical probe fluctuations correspond to holomorphic curves.

Fluctuations dual to defect fields and BPS operators identified.

Non-renormalization of correlators verified to order g^2.

Abstract

We study a defect conformal field theory describing D3-branes intersecting over two space-time dimensions. This theory admits an exact Lagrangian description which includes both two- and four-dimensional degrees of freedom, has (4,4) supersymmetry and is invariant under global conformal transformations. Both two- and four-dimensional contributions to the action are conveniently obtained in a two-dimensional (2,2) superspace. In a suitable limit, the theory has a dual description in terms of a probe D3-brane wrapping an AdS_3 x S^1 slice of AdS_5 x S^5. We consider the AdS/CFT dictionary for this set-up. In particular we find classical probe fluctuations corresponding to the holomorphic curve wy=c\alpha^{\prime}. These fluctuations are dual to defect fields containing massless two-dimensional scalars which parameterize the classical Higgs branch, but do not correspond to states in the Hilbert space of the CFT. We also identify probe fluctuations which are dual to BPS superconformal primary operators and to their descendants. A non-renormalization theorem is conjectured for the correlators of these operators, and verified to order g^2.