Particle theory

Abstract:

The Veneziano-Yankielowicz glueball superpotential for an arbitrary N=1 SUSY pure gauge theory with classical gauge group is derived using an approach following recent work of Dijkgraaf, Vafa and others. These non-perturbative terms, which had hitherto been included by hand in the above approach, are thus seen to arise naturally, and the approach is rendered self-contained. By minimising the glueball superpotential for theories with fundamental matter added, the expected vacuum structure with gaugino condensation and chiral symmetry breaking is obtained. Various possible extensions are also discussed.

Abstract:

We use the Lorentzian AdS/CFT prescription to find the poles of the retarded thermal Green's functions of N = 4 SU(N) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in the limit of large N and large 't Hooft coupling. In the process, we propose a natural definition for quasinormal modes in an asymptotically AdS spacetime, with boundary conditions dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence. The corresponding frequencies determine the dispersion laws for the quasiparticle excitations in the dual finite-temperature gauge theory. Correlation functions of operators dual to massive scalar, vector and gravitational perturbations in a five-dimensional AdS-Schwarzschild background are considered. We find asymptotic formulas for quasinormal frequencies in the massive scalar and tensor cases, and an exact expression for vector perturbations. In the long-distance, low-frequency limit we recover results of the hydrodynamic approximation to thermal Yang-Mills theory.