N=4 Chern-Simons theories and wrapped M-branes in their gravity duals

Abstract

We investigate a class of N=4 quiver Chern-Simons theories and their gravity duals. We define the group of fractional D3-brane charges in a type IIB brane setup with taking account of D3-brane creation due to Hanany-Witten effect, and confirm that it agrees with the 3-cycle homology of the dual geometry, which describes the charges of fractional M2-branes, M5-branes wrapped on 3-cycles. The relation between the fractional brane charge and the torsion of the three-form potential field is partially established. We also discuss the duality between baryonic operators in the Chern-Simons theories and M5-branes wrapped on 5-cycles in the dual geometries. The degeneracy and the conformal dimension of the operators are reproduced on the gravity side. We also comment on the relation between wrapped M2-branes and monopole operators. The baryonic operators we consider are not gauge invariant. We argue that the gauge invariance cannot be imposed on all the operators corresponding to wrapped M-branes in AdS4/CFT3 correspondence.

26 pages, 7 figures, v2: typos corrected, references added, v3: improved arguments on gauge variance of baryonic operators and added comments on the duality between wrapped M2-branes and monopole operators, changed title, corrected typos, added a reference, PTPTeX