String theory duals of Lifshitz-Chern-Simons gauge theories

Abstract

We propose candidate gravity duals for a class of non-Abelian z=2 Lifshitz Chern-Simons (LCS) gauge theories studied by Mulligan, Kachru and Nayak. These are nonrelativistic gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions in which parity and time-reversal symmetries are explicitly broken by the presence of a Chern-Simons term. We show that these field theories can be realized as deformations of DLCQ N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Using the holographic dictionary, we identify the bulk fields that are dual to these deformations. The geometries describing the groundstates of the non-Abelian LCS gauge theories realized here exhibit a mass gap.