Exact probes of orientifolds

Abstract

We compute the exact vacuum expectation value of circular Wilson loops for Euclidean ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills with $G=SO(N),Sp(N)$, in the fundamental and spinor representations. These field theories are dual to type IIB string theory compactified on $AdS_5\times {\mathbb R} {\mathbb P}^5$ plus certain choices of discrete torsion, and we use our results to probe this holographic duality. We first revisit the LLM-type geometries having $AdS_5\times {\mathbb R} {\mathbb P}^5$ as ground state. Our results clarify and refine the identification of these LLM-type geometries as bubbling geometries arising from fermions on a half harmonic oscillator. We furthermore identify the presence of discrete torsion with the one-fermion Wigner distribution becoming negative at the origin of phase space. We then turn to the string world-sheet interpretation of our results and argue that for the quantities considered they imply two features: first, the contribution coming from world-sheets with a single crosscap is closely related to the contribution coming from orientable world-sheets, and second, world-sheets with two crosscaps don't contribute to these quantities.