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Wilson Loops and Spherical Branes

by Davide Astesiano, Pieter Bomans, Fridrik Freyr Gautason, Valentina Giangreco M. Puletti, Alexia Nix

Submission summary

Authors (as registered SciPost users):

Pieter Bomans · Fridrik Freyr Gautason · Alexia Nix · Valentina Giangreco M Puletti

Abstract

We study 1/2-BPS Wilson loop operators in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on $d$-dimensional spheres. Their vacuum expectation values can be computed at large $N$ through supersymmetric localisation. The holographic duals are given by back-reacted spherical D-branes. For $d\neq 4$, the resulting theories are non-conformal and correspondingly, the dual geometries do not possess an asymptotic AdS region. The main aim of this work is to compute the holographic Wilson loops by evaluating the partition function of a probe fundamental string and M2-brane in the dual geometry, focusing on the next-to-leading order. Along the way, we highlight a variety of issues related to the presence of a non-constant dilaton. In particular, the structure of the divergences of the one-loop partition functions takes a non-universal form in contrast to examples available in the literature. We devise a general framework to treat the divergences, successfully match the sub-leading scaling with $\lambda$ and $N$, and provide a first step towards obtaining the numerical prefactor.

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• Present a breakthrough on a previously-identified and long-standing research stumbling block