Inside an Enhancon: Monopoles and Dual Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

In this paper we study wrapped brane configurations that give rise to three dimensional pure Yang-Mills theory with eight supercharges. The corresponding supergravity solution is singular and it was conjectured that the singularity is removed by an enhancon mechanism. Instead, we incorporate non-perturbative gauge fields into supergravity and find a smooth solution for these configurations. Along the way we derive a non-abelian supergravity Lagrangian for type IIA on K3 and explicit formulae for the toroidal reduction of the heterotic string with non-abelian gauge fields. We proceed to analyse the duality with Yang-Mills theory and find that the dual background is a monopole configuration in little string theory.