Spectral Flow on the Higgs Branch and AdS/CFT Duality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the meson spectrum in a strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theory changes along the Higgs branch using AdS/CFT duality, revealing a non-trivial spectral flow related to instanton configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of spectral flow on the Higgs branch via supergravity duals, connecting instanton size to meson spectrum rearrangements.

Findings

Spectral flow corresponds to instanton size variation on D7-branes.

Flow from zero to infinite instanton size forms a closed loop.

Higgs VEV induces a non-trivial spectrum rearrangement.

Abstract

We use AdS/CFT duality to study the large N_c limit of the meson spectrum on the Higgs branch of a strongly coupled, N=2 supersymmetric SU(N_c) gauge theory with N_f =2 fundamental hypermultiplets. In the dual supergravity description, the Higgs branch is described by SU(2) instanton configurations on D7-branes in an AdS background. We compute the spectral flow parameterized by the size of a single instanton. In the large N_c limit, there is a sense in which the flow from zero to infinite instanton size, or Higgs VEV, can be viewed as a closed loop. We show that this flow leads to a non-trivial rearrangement of the spectrum.