Speaker
Mikael Smedbäck
Description
Recently, great progress has been made on understanding the
field theory side of the AdS(4)/CFT(3) duality. The
so-called ABJM theory, which is an N=6 superconformal
Chern-Simons theory, has been conjectured to describe the
world-volume theory on an arbitrary number of M2-branes. We
discuss thermal properties of ABJM theory, by computing
quantum corrections to the free energy. We find that in
weakly coupled ABJM theory on R(2) × S(1), the leading
correction is non-analytic in the ’t Hooft coupling. We
derive a precise formula for the correction. The free energy
can be expressed in terms of the scalar thermal mass, which
is generated by screening effects. We show that this mass
vanishes to 1-loop order. We then go on to 2-loop order
where we find a finite and positive mass squared. Our
results are consistent with the free energy being a
monotonic function in the coupling constant which
interpolates smoothly to the intriguing N^(3/2) behaviour at
strong coupling, where the entropy is strongly suppressed.
