Holomorphic defects in N = 4 SYM at strong coupling

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• James Ratcliffe (University of Southampton)
• Wednesday 29 October 2025, 11:30-12:30
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

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BIDW02 - Diving Deeper into Defects: On the Intersection of Field Theory, Quantum Matter, and Mathematics

I will introduce a family of defect operators in N = 4 Super Yang-Mills that depend holomorphically on position. I will discuss the dynamics of these operators at strong coupling using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Building on the intuition of flavour D7-branes, I will show that these operators are described, on the gravity side of the correspondence, by holomorphic embedding functions that are BPS and solve the equations of motion exactly. I will discuss the generic properties of these embeddings under RG flow. As examples, I will consider the linear solution for flavour D7-branes, and a D3-brane embedding with a Wess-Zumino term. I will show that both these solutions flow to superconformal defects in the IR. In particular, I will show that in the D3-brane case, this resembles a Gukov-Witten defect.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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