The Effective Potential of the N=0* Yang-Mills Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates a mass-deformed N=4 SYM theory, analyzing its stability, vacuum structure, and comparing field theory results with supergravity predictions via AdS/CFT correspondence.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the effective potential in the mass-deformed N=4 SYM and compares perturbative and supergravity results for the vacuum structure.

Findings

The theory is perturbatively stable in the large N limit.

The vacuum with <> = 0 is favored.

Qualitative agreement between field theory and supergravity results.

Abstract

We study the \N=4 SYM theory with SU(N) gauge group in the large N limit, deformed by giving equal mass to the four adjoint fermions. With this modification, a potential is dynamically generated for the six scalars in the theory, \phi^i. We show that the resulting theory is stable (perturbatively in the 't Hooft coupling), and that there are some indications that <\phi>=0 is the vacuum of the theory. Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we compare the results to the corresponding supergravity computation, i.e. brane probing a deformed AdS_5 x S^5 background, and we find qualitative agreement.