Christoph Sieg

We present the planar four-loop anomalous dimension of the composite operator tr(phi[Z,phi]Z) in the flavour SU(2) sector of the N=4 SYM theory. At this loop order wrapping interactions are present: they give rise to contributions proportional to zeta(5) increasing the level of transcendentality of the anomalous dimension. In a sequel of this paper all the details of our calculation will be reported.

We study finite size effects for composite operators in the SU(2) sector of the superconformal beta-deformed N=4 SYM theory. In particular we concentrate on the spectrum of one single magnon. Since in this theory one-impurity states are non BPS we compute their anomalous dimensions including wrapping contributions up to four loops and discuss higher order effects.

In this paper we give all the details of the calculation that we presented in our previous paper arXiv:0712.3522, concerning the four-loop anomalous dimension of the Konishi descendant tr(\phi Z\phi Z-\phi \phi Z Z) in the SU(2) sector of the N=4 planar SYM theory. We explicitly consider all the wrapping diagrams that we compute using an N=1 superspace approach and Gegenbauer polynomial x-space techniques.

We present non-extremal magnetic black string solutions in five-dimensional gauged supergravity. The conformal infinity is the product of time and S^1xS_h, where S_h denotes a compact Riemann surface of genus h. The construction is based on both analytical and numerical techniques. We compute the holographic stress tensor, the Euclidean action and the conserved charges of the solutions and show that the latter satisfy a Smarr-type formula. The phase structure is determined in the canonical ensemble, and it is shown that there is a first order phase transition from small to large black strings, which disappears above a certain critical magnetic charge that is obtained numerically. For another particular value of the magnetic charge, that corresponds to a twisting of the dual super Yang-Mills theory, the conformal anomalies coming from the background curvature and those arising from the coupling to external gauge fields exactly cancel. We also obtain supersymmetric solutions describing waves propagating on extremal BPS magnetic black strings, and show that they possess a Siklos-Virasoro reparametrization invariance.

To endow the N=1* SYM theory with quarks, we embed D7-brane probes into its gravity dual, known as the Polchinski-Strassler background. The non-vanishing 3-form flux G_3 in the background is dual to mass terms for the three adjoint chiral superfields, deforming the N=4 SYM theory to the N=1* SYM theory. We keep its three mass parameters independent. This generalizes our analysis in hep-th/0610276 for the N=2* SYM theory. We work at second order in the mass perturbation, i.e. G_3 and its backreaction on the background are considered perturbatively up to this order. We find analytic solutions for the embeddings which in general depend also on angular variables. We discuss the properties of the solutions and give error estimates on our approximation. By applying the method of holographic renormalization, we show that in all cases the embeddings are at least consistent with supersymmetry.

We motivate and summarize our analysis of hep-th/0610276 in which we consider D7-brane probe embeddings in the Polchinski-Strassler background with N=2 supersymmetry. The corresponding dual gauge theory is given by the N=2* theory with fundamental matter.

As an extension of holography with flavour, we analyze in detail the embedding of a D7-brane probe into the Polchinski-Strassler gravity background, in which the breaking of conformal symmetry is induced by a 3-form flux G_3. This corresponds to giving masses to the adjoint chiral multiplets. We consider the N=2 supersymmetric case in which one of the adjoint chiral multiplets is kept massless while the masses of the other two are equal. This setup requires a generalization of the known expressions for the backreaction of G_3 in the case of three equal masses to generic mass values. We work to second order in the masses to obtain the embedding of D7-brane probes in the background. At this order, the 2-form potentials corresponding to the background flux induce an 8-form potential which couples to the worldvolume of the D7-branes. We show that the embeddings preserve an SU(2) x SU(2) symmetry. We study possible embeddings both analytically in a particular approximation, as well as numerically. The embeddings preserve supersymmetry, as we investigate using the approach of holographic renormalization. The meson spectrum associated to one of the embeddings found reflects the presence of the adjoint masses by displaying a mass gap.