Spectral Flow on the Higgs Branch and AdS/CFT Duality
Abstract
We use AdS/CFT duality to study the large Nc limit of the meson spectrum on the Higgs branch of a strongly coupled, N=2 supersymmetric SU(Nc) gauge theory with Nf =2 fundamental hypermultiplets. In the dual supergravity description, the Higgs branch is described by SU(2) instanton configurations on D7-branes in an AdS background. We compute the spectral flow parameterized by the size of a single instanton. In the large Nc limit, there is a sense in which the flow from zero to infinite instanton size, or Higgs VEV, can be viewed as a closed loop. We show that this flow leads to a non-trivial rearrangement of the spectrum.
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