Speaker: Christopher Waddell 

Affiliation:
University of British Columbia

Title:
Holographic and localization calculations of boundary F for $\mathcal{N} = 4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory

Abstract:
N = 4 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory can be defined on a half-space with a variety of boundary conditions preserving scale invariance and half of the original supersymmetry. These theories describe the low-energy physics of D3-branes ending on stacks of D5-branes and NS5-branes in various ways. Each boundary condition (and more generally, any four-dimensional boundary conformal field theory) can be characterized by a boundary entropy (called “boundary F”) which governs the vacuum entanglement entropy for a half-ball centered on the boundary and also the partition function for the field theory on a hemisphere HS^4. In this work, we calculate boundary F holographically for U(N) N = 4 SYM theory with arbitrary half-supersymmetric boundary conditions, using the known dual type IIB supergravity solutions. For many cases, we also calculate boundary F exactly using supersymmetric localization. The leading term at large N in the supergravity and localization results agree exactly as a function of the ‘t Hooft coupling lambda.