2011/12/22 by Jonathan J. Heckman, Herman Verlinde, Heckman, Jonathan J. +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1112.5210
v2: 64 pages, 3 figures, references added, typos corrected
openalex publication_date 2011/12/22 · arxiv created 2012/01/05 · arxiv updated 2015/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivated by potential applications to holography on space-times of positive curvature, and by the successful twistor description of scattering amplitudes, we propose a new dual matrix formulation of N = 4 gauge theory on S(4). The matrix model is defined by taking the low energy limit of a holomorphic Chern-Simons theory on CP(3|4), in the presence of a large instanton flux. The theory comes with a choice of S(4) radius L and a parameter N controlling the overall size of the matrices. The flat space variant of the 4D effective theory arises by taking the large N scaling limit of the matrix model, with lpl2 ~ L2 / N held fixed. Its massless spectrum contains both spin one and spin two excitations, which we identify with gluons and gravitons. As shown in the companion paper, the matrix model correlation functions of both these excitations correctly reproduce the corresponding MHV scattering amplitudes. We present evidence that the scaling limit defines a gravitational theory with a finite Planck length. In particular we find that in the lpl -> 0 limit, the matrix model makes contact with the CSW rules for amplitudes of pure gauge theory, which are uncontaminated by conformal supergravity. We also propose a UV completion for the system by embedding the matrix model in the physical superstring.