Abstract:We construct the five-dimensional supergravity dual of the N = 1 * mass deformation of the N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on S 4 and use it to calculate the universal contribution to the corresponding S 4 free energy at large 't Hooft coupling in the planar limit. The holographic RG flow solutions are smooth and preserve four supercharges. As a novel feature compared to the holographic duals of N = 1 * on R 4 , in our backgrounds the five-dimensional dilaton has a non-trivial profile, and the gaugino condensate is fixed in terms of the mass-deformation parameters. Important aspects of the analysis involve characterizing the ambiguities in the partition function of non-conformal N = 1 supersymmetric theories on S 4 as well as the action of S-duality on the N = 1 * theory.

We argue that the complex transformation relating the Schwarzschild to the Taub-NUT metric, introduced by Talbot, is in fact an electric-magnetic duality transformation. We show that at null infinity, the complex transformation is equivalent to a complexified Bondi-Metzner-Sachs supertranslation, which rotates the supertranslation and the dual (magnetic) supertranslation charges. This can also be seen from the cubic coupling between the classical source and its background, which for Taub-NUT is given by a complex phase rotation acting on gravitational minimal couplings. The same phase rotation generates dyons from electrons at the level of minimally coupled amplitudes, manifesting the double copy relation between the two solutions.

We consider two applications of the factorization of infrared dynamics in QED and gravity. The first is a redefinition of the Lorentz transformations that makes them commute with supertranslations. The other is the process of particle creation near a black hole horizon. For the latter we show that the emission of soft particles factors out of the Smatrix in the fixed-background approximation and to leading order in the soft limit. The factorization is implemented by dressing the incoming and outgoing asymptotic states with clouds of soft photons and soft gravitons. We find that while the soft photon cloud has no effect, the soft graviton cloud induces a phase shift in the Bogolyubov coefficients relating the incoming and outgoing modes. However, the flux of outgoing particles, given by the absolute value of the Bogolyubov coefficient, is insensitive to this phase.

We study several properties of some new charges of asymptotically flat spacetimes. These dual supertranslation charges are akin to the magnetic large U (1) charges in QED. In this paper we find the symmetries associated with these charges and show that the global dual supertranslation charge is topological because it is invariant under globally defined, smooth variations of the asymptotic metric. We also exhibit spacetimes where the charge does not vanish and we find dynamical processes that interpolate between regions with different values of these charges.

We provide a field theory interpretation of the attractor mechanism for asymptotically AdS 4 dyonic BPS black holes whose entropy is captured by the supersymmetric index of the twisted ABJM theory at Chern-Simons level one. We holographically compute the renormalized off-shell quantum effective action in the twisted ABJM theory as a function of the supersymmetric fermion masses and the arbitrary vacuum expectation values of the dimension one scalar bilinear operators and show that extremizing the effective action with respect to the vacuum expectation values of the dimension one scalar bilinears is equivalent to the attractor mechanism in the bulk. In fact, we show that the holographic quantum effective action coincides with the entropy functional and, therefore, its value at the extremum reproduces the black hole entropy.

In this paper we study the conjectural relation between confinement in a quantum field theory and the presence of a phase transition in its corresponding entanglement entropy. We determine the sufficient conditions for the latter and compare to the conditions for having a confining Wilson line. We demonstrate the relation in several examples. Superficially, it may seem that certain confining field theories with a non-local high energy behavior, like the dual of D5 branes wrapping a two-cycle, do not admit the corresponding phase transition. However, upon closer inspection we find that, through the introduction of a regulating UV-cutoff, new eight-surface configurations appear, that satisfy the correct concavity condition and recover the phase transition in the entanglement entropy. We show that a local-UV-completion to the confining non-local theories has a similar effect to that of the aforementioned cutoff.

Abstract:Recently it has been shown that infrared divergences in the conventional Smatrix elements of gauge and gravitational theories arise from a violation of the conservation laws associated with large gauge symmetries. These infrared divergences can be cured by using the Faddeev-Kulish (FK) asymptotic states as the basis for S-matrix elements. Motivated by this connection, we study the action of BMS supertranslations on the FK asymptotic states of perturbative quantum gravity. We compute the BMS charge of the FK states and show that it characterizes the superselection sector to which the state belongs. Conservation of the BMS charge then implies that there is no transition between different superselection sectors, hence showing that the FK graviton clouds implement the necessary transition induced by the scattering process.

We study a set of examples of holographic duals to theories with spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance in different dimensions. The geometries are domain walls interpolating between two AdS spaces, with a non-trivial background scalar field dual to a relevant operator. We comment on a subtlety in the low momentum expansion pointed out in arXiv:1304.3051 for the case of background gravity and revise the dynamical gravity results of arXiv:1207.0006, where the dilaton pole was missing in the scalar-scalar and tensor-tensor two-point functions. We compute the energy-momentum tensor and scalar two-point functions and show that there is indeed a massless dilaton pole.Comment: 28 pages. v2: references added. v3: published version in JHE