25–27 Mar 2010
<a href="http://www.nordita.org/" "target=_blank">Nordita</a>
Europe/Stockholm timezone

On thermodynamics of N=6 superconformal Chern-Simons theory

26 Mar 2010, 12:20
20m
Lindstedtsvägen 3, room E2 (KTH Campus)

Lindstedtsvägen 3, room E2

KTH Campus

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.

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