Effective action of beta-deformed N=4 SYM theory and AdS/CFT

Abstract

We compute the one-loop effective action in \N=1 conformal SU(N) gauge theory which is an exactly marginal deformation of the \N=4 SYM theory. We consider an abelian background of constant \N = 1 gauge field and single chiral scalar. While for finite N the effective action depends non-trivially on the deformation parameter β, this dependence disappears in the large N limit if the parameter βis real. This conclusion matches the strong-coupling prediction coming from the form of a D3-brane probe action in the dual supergravity background: for the simplest choice of the D3-brane position the probe action happens to be the same as for a D3-brane in AdS_5 x S^5 placed parallel to the boundary of AdS_5. This suggests that in the real βdeformation case there exists a large N non-renormalization theorem for the 4-derivative term in the action.

15 pages, no figures. V2: comments, reference added. V3: the version to appear in PRD