A New Holographic Duality for Conformal Mass Deformations

Abstract

We construct a space-dependent conformal mass deformation of ABJM on the half-space $z>0$ and show that the vacua of this theory are dual to a large class of half-BPS bubbling solutions of the form $AdS_3\times S^3\times S^3\timesΣ$, with superalgebra $D(2,1|γ)^{\oplus2}$, parametrized by $γ<0$. The conformal symmetry of a plane is preserved provided that the mass deformation scales as $m(z)=\frac{c}{z}$. We give the first field-theory explanation of the exceptional superalgebra parameter $γ$ in M2-brane field theory in terms of the coefficient of the inverse-distance mass deformation of ABJM: $γ=\frac{1-2c}{1+2c}$. We demonstrate this using the methods of Polchinski and Strassler, which we first apply to the Janus interfaces of $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills and ABJM to relate localized mass sources to scalar matching conditions.