2013/11/20 by Venkat Balasubramanian, Alex Buchel
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep02(2014)030
13 pages, 2 figures; supplemental files attached
arxiv created 2013/11/20 · arxiv updated 2015/06/18
Although Pilch-Warner (PW) gravitational renormalization group flow [arXiv:hep-th/0004063] passes a number of important consistency checks to be identified as a holographic dual to a large-N SU(N) \cal N=2^* supersymmetric gauge theory, it fails to reproduce the free energy of the theory on S4, computed with the localization techniques. This disagreement points to the existence of a larger dual gravitational consistent truncation, which in the gauge theory flat-space limit reduces to a PW flow. Such truncation was recently identified by Bobev-Elvang-Freedman-Pufu (BEFP) [arXiv:1311.1508]. Additional bulk scalars of the BEFP gravitation truncation might lead to destabilization of the finite-temperature deformed PW flows, and thus modify the low-temperature thermodynamics and hydrodynamics of \cal N =2^* plasma. We compute the quasinormal spectrum of these bulk scalar fields in the thermal PW flows and demonstrate that these modes do not condense, as long as the masses of the \cal N=2^* hypermultiplet components are real.