Holographic approach to NS5-brane deformations

by Konstadinos Sfetsos (University of Patras)

Tuesday 4 Mar 2008, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

Deformations of NS5-branes can be described by exactly marginal perturbations of the underlying 2-dim CFT, which is conjectured to be holographically dual to the little string theory that resides on their world-volume. After reviewing relevant background material we derive the exactly marginal operators corresponding to deformations of a circular distribution of NS5-branes, which is described by the coset model CFT SU(2)/U(1) X SL(2,R)/U(1). Subsequently, we perform a complementary analysis of the same deformations using the associated supersymmetric sigma-model. We explicitly demonstrate a precise agreement between the two approaches, thus verifying the holographic correspondence. This rests upon a delicate interplay between exact CFT operators and their semiclassical realizations in terms of target-space variables.