Little string theories on curved manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we study the 6d Little String Theory (LST) (the decoupled theory on the worldvolume of N NS5-branes) on curved manifolds, by using its holographic duality to Type II string theory in asymptotically linear dilaton backgrounds. We focus on backgrounds with a large number of Killing vectors (namely, products of maximally symmetric spaces), without requiring supersymmetry (we do not turn on any background fields except the metric). LST is non-local so it is not obvious which spaces it can be defined on; we show that holography implies that the theory cannot be put on negatively curved spaces, but only on spaces with zero or positive curvature. For example, one cannot put LST on a product of an anti-de Sitter space times another space, without turning on extra background fields. On spaces with positive curvature, such as S 6 , R 2 × S 4 , S 3 × S 3 , etc., we typically find (for large N ) dual holographic backgrounds which are weakly coupled and weakly curved everywhere, so that they can be well-described by Type II supergravity. In some cases more than one smooth solution exists for LST on the same space, and they all contribute to the partition function. We also study the thermodynamical properties of LST compactified on spheres, finding the leading correction to the Hagedorn behavior of the spectrum, which is different on curved space than on flat space. We discuss the holographic renormalization procedure, which must be implemented in order to get a finite free energy for the LST; we do not know how to implement it for general spaces, but we can (and we do) implement it for the theory compactified on S 4 .

Supersymmetric Yang-Mills, spherical branes, and precision holography

“…The approach of [23,24] is however not applicable for d = 6 due to the linear dilaton characteristic of the little string theory. Inspired by the regularization procedure in the matrix model analysis and the results in [25,26,27] we are able to propose a way to cancel the divergences appearing in the spherical D5-brane solution and obtain an agreement with the results from supersymmetric localization.…”

“…Such a finite set of counterterms was shown to exist in a recent study of five-branes on some curved manifolds[27].…”

Holographic QFTs on S2×S2, spontaneous symmetry breaking and Efimov saddle points

“…During completion of this work we became aware of the article [26], which addressed similar problems and reached some of our conclusions, in the absence of a bulk scalar field. A similar setup was also considered in [41] in connection with Little String Theory. It was also pointed out to us 2 that phase transitions in holographic CFTs on product manifold were also observed in an older work [42].…”