Quantized Giant Gravitons as the Periodic Table of Supersymmetric States: D3, M2 and M5

Abstract

We consider giant gravitons in the probe approximation when they are described by classical brane configurations in AdS$_{p+2}\times S^{q+2}$ wrapping a particular $q$-cycle and spinning in $S^{q+2}$. We quantize the full set of fluctuations of these configurations and show that they are sufficient to capture all the supersymmetric single-letter partition functions of the dual field theory. We explicitly discuss the cases of D3, M2 and M5 branes and reproduce the single-letter indices for all fractions of supersymmetry. We also provide a new derivation of the full finite-$N$ half-BPS index by promoting certain fluctuations to matrix-valued fields. We elaborate on the obstructions for the general finite-$N$ computations. Given that the single-letter partition functions are the building blocks of all supersymmetric enumerations, including for the black hole entropy, our work provides a direct gravitational counting of those degrees of freedom modulo finite-$N$ obstacles due to non-Abelian effects.