We obtain first order equations that determine a super symmetric kink solution in five-dimensional Af = 8 gauged supergravity. The kink interpolates between an exterior anti-de Sitter region with maximal supersymmetry and an interior anti-de Sitter region with one quarter of the maximal supersymmetry. One eighth of supersymmetry is preserved by the kink as a whole. We interpret it as describing the renormalization group flow in J\f = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory broken to an Af = 1 theory by the addition of a mass term for one of the three adjoint chiral superfields. A detailed correspondence is obtained between fields of bulk supergravity in the interior anti-de Sitter region and composite operators of the infrared field theory. We also point out that the truncation used to find the reduced symmetry critical point can be extended to obtain a new Af = 4 gauged supergravity theory holographically dual to a sector of Af = 2 gauge theories based on quiver diagrams. e-print archive: http.y/xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9904017 *On leave from Department of Physics and Astronomy, USC, Los Angeles, CA 90089 364 RENORMALIZATION GROUP FLOWSWe consider more general kink geometries and construct a c-function that is positive and monotonic if a weak energy condition holds in the bulk gravity theory. For even-dimensional boundaries, the c-function coincides with the trace anomaly coefficients of the holographically related field theory in limits where conformal invariance is recovered.

We show that there is a non-trivial relationship between the dilaton of IIB supergravity, and the coset of scalar fields in five-dimensional, gauged N = 8 supergravity. This has important consequences for the running of the gauge coupling in massive perturbations of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We conjecture an exact analytic expression for the tendimensional dilaton in terms of five-dimensional quantities, and we test this conjecture.Specifically, we construct a family of solutions to IIB supergravity that preserve half of the supersymmetries, and are lifts of supersymmetric flows in five-dimensional, gauged N = 8 supergravity. Via the AdS/CFT correspondence these flows correspond to softly broken N = 4, large N Yang-Mills theory on part of the Coulomb branch of N = 2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills. Our solutions involve non-trivial backgrounds for all the tensor gauge fields as well as for the dilaton and axion.

States on the Coulomb branch of N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory are studied from the point of view of gauged supergravity in five dimensions. These supersymmetric solutions provide examples of consistent truncation from type IIB supergravity in ten dimensions. A mass gap for states created by local operators and perfect screening for external quarks arise in the supergravity approximation. We offer an interpretation of these surprising features in terms of ensembles of brane distributions.

No abstract

We find M -theory solutions that are holographic duals of flows of the maximally supersymmetric (N = 8) scalar-fermion theory in (2 + 1) dimensions. In particular, we construct the M -theory solution dual to a flow in which a single chiral multiplet is given a mass, and the theory goes to a new infra-red fixed point. We also examine this new solution using M 2-brane probes. The (2 + 1)-dimensional field theory fixed-point is closely related to that of Leigh and Strassler, while the M -theory solution is closely related to the corresponding IIB flow solution. We recast the IIB flow solution in a more geometric manner and use this to obtain an Ansatz for the M -theory flow. We are able to generalize our solution further to obtain flows with del Pezzo sub-manifolds, and we give an explicit solution with a conifold singularity.