TY - JOUR
T1 - AdS/CFT correspondence and symmetry breaking
AU - Klebanov, Igor R.
AU - Witten, Edward
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to A. Ceresole, G. Dall'Agata, D. Freedman, S. Gubser, E Kraus, E Larsen, V. Periwal and L. Rastelli for useful comments. The work of I.R.K. was supported in part by the NSF grant PHY-9802484 and by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Grant No. 91-48. The work of E.W. is supported in part by NSF grant PHY-9513835.
PY - 1999/9/6
Y1 - 1999/9/6
N2 - We study, using the dual AdS description, the vacua of field theories where some of the gauge symmetry is broken by expectation values of scalar fields. In such vacua, operators built out of the scalar fields acquire expectation values, and we show how to calculate them from the behavior of perturbations to the AdS background near the boundary. Specific examples include the N = 4 SYM theory, and theories on D3-branes placed on orbifolds and conifolds. We also clarify some subtleties of the AdS/CFT correspondence that arise in this analysis. In particular, we explain how scalar fields in AdS space of sufficiently negative mass-squared can be associated with CFT operators of two possible dimensions. All dimensions are bounded from below by (d - 2)/2; this is the unitarity bound for scalar operators in d-dimensional field theory. We further argue that the generating functional for correlators in the theory with one choice of operator dimension is a Legendre transform of the generating functional in the theory with the other choice.
AB - We study, using the dual AdS description, the vacua of field theories where some of the gauge symmetry is broken by expectation values of scalar fields. In such vacua, operators built out of the scalar fields acquire expectation values, and we show how to calculate them from the behavior of perturbations to the AdS background near the boundary. Specific examples include the N = 4 SYM theory, and theories on D3-branes placed on orbifolds and conifolds. We also clarify some subtleties of the AdS/CFT correspondence that arise in this analysis. In particular, we explain how scalar fields in AdS space of sufficiently negative mass-squared can be associated with CFT operators of two possible dimensions. All dimensions are bounded from below by (d - 2)/2; this is the unitarity bound for scalar operators in d-dimensional field theory. We further argue that the generating functional for correlators in the theory with one choice of operator dimension is a Legendre transform of the generating functional in the theory with the other choice.
KW - Anti-de sitter space
KW - Conical singularities
KW - Infrared fixed points
KW - String theory
KW - Supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory
KW - Threebranes
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U2 - 10.1016/S0550-3213(99)00387-9
DO - 10.1016/S0550-3213(99)00387-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0033530062
SN - 0550-3213
VL - 556
SP - 89
EP - 114
JO - Nuclear Physics B
JF - Nuclear Physics B
IS - 1-2
ER -