scholarly journals ON THE DESCRIPTION OF SURFACE OPERATORS IN ${\mathcal N} = 2^*$ SYM

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (06) ◽  
pp. 1330003 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN PABLO BABARO ◽  
GASTON GIRIBET

Alday and Tachikawa [Lett. Math. Phys.94, 87 (2010)] observed that the Nekrasov partition function of [Formula: see text] superconformal gauge theories in the presence of fundamental surface operators can be associated to conformal blocks of a 2D CFT with affine sl(2) symmetry. This can be interpreted as the insertion of a fundamental surface operator changing the conformal symmetry from the Virasoro symmetry discovered in Ref. 2 to the affine Kac–Moody symmetry. A natural question arises as to how such a 2D CFT description can be extended to the case of non-fundamental surface operators. Motivated by this question, we review the results [Y. Hikida and V. Schomerus, JHEP0710, 064 (2007); S. Ribault, JHEP0805, 073 (2008)] and put them together to suggest a way to address the problem: It follows from this analysis that the expectation value of a non-fundamental surface operator in the SU(2) [Formula: see text] super Yang–Mills (YM) theory would be in correspondence with the expectation value of a single vertex operator in a two-dimensional CFT with reduced affine symmetry and whose central charge is parametrized by the integer number that labels the type of singularity of the surface operator.

1992 ◽  
Vol 07 (11) ◽  
pp. 2469-2485
Author(s):  
A. C. CADAVID ◽  
R. J. FINKELSTEIN

An affine field theory may be constructed by gauging an affine algebra. The momentum integrals of the affine N = 4 Yang–Mills theory are ultraviolet finite but diverge because the sum over states is infinite. If the affine symmetry is broken by postulating a nonvanishing vacuum expectation value for that component of the scalar field lying in the L0 direction, then the theory acquires a linear mass spectrum. This broken theory is ultraviolet finite too, but the mass spectrum is unbounded. If it is also postulated that the mass spectrum has an upper bound (say, the Planck mass), then the resulting theory appears to be altogether finite. The influence of the exotic states has been estimated and, according to the proposed scenario, is negligible below energies at which gravitational interactions become important. The final effective theory has the symmetry of a compact Lie algebra augmented by the operator L0.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Mück

Abstract Supersymmetric circular Wilson loops in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills theory are discussed starting from their Gaussian matrix model representations. Previous results on the generating functions of Wilson loops are reviewed and extended to the more general case of two different loop contours, which is needed to discuss coincident loops with opposite orientations. A combinatorial formula representing the connected correlators of multiply wound Wilson loops in terms of the matrix model solution is derived. Two new results are obtained on the expectation value of the circular Wilson loop, the expansion of which into a series in 1/N and to all orders in the ’t Hooft coupling λ was derived by Drukker and Gross about twenty years ago. The connected correlators of two multiply wound Wilson loops with arbitrary winding numbers are calculated as a series in 1/N. The coefficient functions are derived not only as power series in λ, but also to all orders in λ by expressing them in terms of the coefficients of the Drukker and Gross series. This provides an efficient way to calculate the 1/N series, which can probably be generalized to higher-point correlators.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Beccaria ◽  
A. Hasan

Abstract We consider U(N) $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory and discuss how to extract the strong coupling limit of non-planar corrections to observables involving the $$ \frac{1}{2} $$ 1 2 -BPS Wilson loop. Our approach is based on a suitable saddle point treatment of the Eynard-Orantin topological recursion in the Gaussian matrix model. Working directly at strong coupling we avoid the usual procedure of first computing observables at finite planar coupling λ, order by order in 1/N, and then taking the λ ≫ 1 limit. In the proposed approach, matrix model multi-point resolvents take a simplified form and some structures of the genus expansion, hardly visible at low order, may be identified and rigorously proved. As a sample application, we consider the expectation value of multiple coincident circular supersymmetric Wilson loops as well as their correlator with single trace chiral operators. For these quantities we provide novel results about the structure of their genus expansion at large tension, generalising recent results in arXiv:2011.02885.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvain Ribault

We investigate exactly solvable two-dimensional conformal field theories that exist at generic values of the central charge, and that interpolate between A-series or D-series minimal models. When the central charge becomes rational, correlation functions of these CFTs may tend to correlation functions of minimal models, or diverge, or have finite limits which can be logarithmic. These results are based on analytic relations between four-point structure constants and residues of conformal blocks.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (08) ◽  
pp. 627-639
Author(s):  
ZHIFENG XIE

In planar [Formula: see text] supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory we have studied one kind of (locally) BPS Wilson loops composed of a large number of light-like segments, i.e. null zig-zags. These contours oscillate around smooth underlying spacelike paths. At one-loop in perturbation theory, we have compared the finite part of the expectation value of null zig-zags to the finite part of the expectation value of non-scalar-coupled Wilson loops whose contours are the underlying smooth spacelike paths. In arXiv:0710.1060 [hep-th] it was argued that these quantities are equal for the case of a rectangular Wilson loop. Here we present a modest extension of this result to zig-zags of circular shape and zig-zags following non-parallel, disconnected line segments and show analytically that the one-loop finite part is indeed that given by the smooth spacelike Wilson loop without coupling to scalars which the zig-zag contour approximates. We make some comments regarding the generalization to arbitrary shapes.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (22) ◽  
pp. 4291-4300
Author(s):  
ROSY TEH ◽  
KHAI-MING WONG ◽  
PIN-WAI KOH

Monopole-instanton in topologically massive gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions with a Chern–Simons mass term have been studied by Pisarski some years ago. He investigated the SU(2) Yang–Mills–Higgs model with an additional Chern–Simons mass term in the action. Pisarski argued that there is a monopole-instanton solution that is regular everywhere, but found that it does not possess finite action. There were no exact or numerical solutions being presented by Pisarski. Hence it is our purpose to further investigate this solution in more detail. We obtained numerical regular solutions that smoothly interpolates between the behavior at small and large distances for different values of Chern–Simons term strength and for several fixed values of Higgs field strength. The monopole-instanton's action is real but infinite. The action vanishes for large Chern–Simons term only when the Higgs field expectation value vanishes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 81 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Canfora

AbstractAn infinite-dimensional family of analytic solutions in pure SU(2) Yang–Mills theory at finite density in $$(3+1)$$ ( 3 + 1 ) dimensions is constructed. It is labelled by two integeres (p and q) as well as by a two-dimensional free massless scalar field. The gauge field depends on all the 4 coordinates (to keep alive the topological charge) but in such a way to reduce the (3+1)-dimensional Yang–Mills field equations to the field equation of a 2D free massless scalar field. For each p and q, both the on-shell action and the energy-density reduce to the action and Hamiltonian of the corresponding 2D CFT. The topological charge density associated to the non-Abelian Chern–Simons current is non-zero. It is possible to define a non-linear composition within this family as if these configurations were “Lego blocks”. The non-linear effects of Yang–Mills theory manifest themselves since the topological charge density of the composition of two solutions is not the sum of the charge densities of the components. This leads to an upper bound on the amplitudes in order for the topological charge density to be well-defined. This suggests that if the temperature and/or the energy is/are high enough, the topological density of these configurations is not well-defined anymore. Semiclassically, one can show that (depending on whether the topological charge is even or odd) some of the operators appearing in the 2D CFT should be quantized as Fermions (despite the Bosonic nature of the classical field).


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Picco ◽  
Sylvain Ribault ◽  
Raoul Santachiara

We perform Monte-Carlo computations of four-point cluster connectivities in the critical 2d Potts model, for numbers of states Q\in (0,4)Q∈(0,4) that are not necessarily integer. We compare these connectivities to four-point functions in a CFT that interpolates between D-series minimal models. We find that 3 combinations of the 4 independent connectivities agree with CFT four-point functions, down to the 22 to 44 significant digits of our Monte-Carlo computations. However, we argue that the agreement is exact only in the special cases Q=0, 3, 4Q=0,3,4. We conjecture that the Potts model can be analytically continued to a double cover of the half-plane \{\Re c <13\}{ℜc<13}, where cc is the central charge of the Virasoro symmetry algebra.


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