Instantons, supersymmetric vacua, and emergent geometries.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - t h / 0 6 0 9 1 8 6 v 3 1 5 N o v 2 0 0 6 hep-th/0609186 PUPT-2205 MCTP-06-26 Instantons, supersymmetric vacua, and emergent geometries Hai Lin Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040, USA and Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Abstract We study instanton solutions and superpotentials for the large number of vacua of the plane-wave matrix model and a 2+1 dimensional Super Yang-Mills theory on R× S2 with sixteen supercharges. We get the superpotential in the weak coupling limit from the gauge theory description. We study the gravity description of these instantons. Perturbatively with respect to a background, they are Euclidean branes wrapping cycles in the dual gravity background. Moreover, the superpotential can be given by the energy of the electric charge system characterizing each vacuum. These charges are interpreted as the eigenvalues of matrices from a reduction for the 1/8 BPS sector of the gauge theories. We also discuss qualitatively the emergence of the extra spatial dimensions appeared on the gravity side. 1 1 Introduction Many supersymmetric field theories have a large number of supersymmetric vacua. In the context of AdS/CFT correspondence [1],[2],[3], when these field theories have string theory dual descriptions, these vacua are dual to supergravity backgrounds. These back- ground geometries are the saddle points where string perturbation theory can be ex- panded around. In this paper we study instantons interpolating between different supersymmetric geometries corresponding to different vacua of the gauge theories. We associate each BPS vacuum geometry with a value of a superpotetial, which is the vacuum expectation value of a particular operator on the gauge theory side. The superponetial can be calculated independently from gauge theory and gravity side. The superpotential from the gravity side reveals the quantum nature of the emergent ge