Highly Effective Actions

Abstract

It is conjectured that the world-volume action of a probe D3-brane in an $AdS_5 \times S^5$ background of type IIB superstring theory, with one unit of flux, can be reinterpreted as the exact effective action (or highly effective action) for U(2), ${\cal N} = 4$ super Yang-Mills theory on the Coulomb branch. An analogous conjecture for $U(2)_k \times U(2)_{-k} $ ABJM theory is also presented. The main evidence supporting these conjectures is that the brane actions have all of the expected symmetries and dualities. Highly effective actions have general coordinate invariance, even though they describe nongravitational theories.