Four Lectures On The Gauge/Gravity Correspondence

TL;DR

This paper reviews efforts to extend the gauge/gravity correspondence to non-conformal supersymmetric gauge theories, focusing on fractional D-branes, wrapped D-branes, and their supergravity solutions, highlighting open problems and connections to other approaches.

Contribution

It provides a pedagogical overview of non-conformal gauge/gravity dualities, analyzing specific examples like fractional D-branes and wrapped D-branes, and discusses their implications and open questions.

Findings

Supergravity solutions encode gauge theory information.

Identification of open problems in extending the correspondence.

Connections between different geometric and brane configurations.

Abstract

We review in a pedagogical manner some of the efforts aiming to extend the gauge/gravity correspondence to non-conformal supersymmetric gauge theories in four dimensions. After giving a general overview, we discuss in detail two specific examples: fractional D-branes on orbifolds and D-branes wrapped on supersymmetric cycles of Calabi-Yau spaces. We explore in particular which gauge theory information can be extracted from the corresponding supergravity solutions, and what the remaining open problems are. We also briefly explain the connection between these and other approaches, such as fractional branes on conifolds, branes suspended between branes, M5-branes on Riemann surfaces and M-theory on G2-holonomy manifolds, and discuss the role played by geometric transitions in all that.