Instanton Operators in Five-Dimensional Gauge
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MTH-KCL/2014-20 QMUL-PH-14-25 Instanton Operators in Five-Dimensional Gauge Theories N. Lambert a,∗, C. Papageorgakis b,† and M. Schmidt-Sommerfeld c,d,‡ aDepartment of Mathematics King’s College London, WC2R 2LS, UK bCRST and School of Physics and Astronomy Queen Mary University of London, E1 4NS, UK cArnold-Sommerfeld-Center f¨ur Theoretische Physik, LMU M¨unchen Theresienstraße 37, 80333 M¨unchen, Germany dExcellence Cluster Universe, Technische Universit¨at M¨unchen Boltzmannstraße 2, 85748 Garching, Germany Abstract We discuss instanton operators in five-dimensional Yang-Mills gauge theo- ries. These are defined as disorder operators which create a non-vanishing arXiv:1412.2789v3 [hep-th] 4 Jun 2015 second Chern class on a four-sphere surrounding their insertion point. As such they may be thought of as higher-dimensional analogues of three- dimensional monopole (or ‘t Hooft) operators. We argue that they play an important role in the enhancement of the Lorentz symmetry for maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills to SO(1, 5) at strong coupling. ∗E-mail address: [email protected] †E-mail address: [email protected] ‡E-mail address: [email protected] 1 Introduction One of the more dramatic results to come out of the study of strongly coupled string theory and M-theory was the realisation that there exist UV-complete quantum super- conformal field theories (SCFTs) in five and six dimensions [1–5]. These theories then provide UV completions to a variety of perturbatively non-renormalisable five-dimensional (5D) Yang-Mills theories. In this paper we will consider the notion of ‘instanton operators’ (or Yang operators) and explore their role in five-dimensional Yang-Mills. These local operators are a natural higher-dimensional analogue of monopole (or ’t Hooft) operators in three dimensions [6–8] which are e.g. important in including eleven-dimensional momentum transverse to M2-branes in the ABJM model [9]. Indeed, in a flux background M2-branes expand into M5-branes and the magnetic flux of the monopoles is mapped into instanton flux [10]. Therefore one can expect an operator similar to a monopole operator in 3D to play as important a role for M5-branes, that is in the relationship between the six-dimensional (2,0) SCFT and five-dimensional Yang-Mills. 5D Yang-Mills has a conserved current 1 J = Tr ⋆ (F F ) (1.1) 8π2 ∧ and the instantons of the theory are BPS particles, also referred to as instanton-solitons, which carry the associated charge of J. Intuitively, instanton operators act as ‘instanton- soliton-creating operators’, which insert a topological defect at a spacetime point. This imposes certain (singular) boundary conditions for the behaviour of the gauge field at the insertion point. The classical equations compatible with such a structure were first solved by Yang in the 70’s [11], in the context of generalising the Dirac monopole solution to a static, SO(5) symmetric particle in 6D SU(2) gauge theory. This solution, being time- independent, is a solution of (Euclidean) 5D super-Yang-Mills and can be extended to any 1 gauge group. These turn out to be 2 -BPS only for ρ = 0, where the ρ denotes the instanton size modulus. More formally, instanton operators are defined in a manner familiar from three dimen- sions: they modify the boundary conditions for the gauge field in the path integral of 5D Yang-Mills theories. An immediate objection may be that naively we cannot define a the- ory by a non-renormalisable lagrangian and consequently we also cannot define an operator by a path integral prescription based on such a lagrangian. However, one may appeal to the conjecture of [12, 13] that the maximally supersymmetric 5D Yang-Mills lagrangian is non-perturbatively UV complete (e.g. along the lines of [14]) and does define a theory. In such a scenario, instanton operators may play a crucial role in the UV completion, resulting in a self-consistent picture.1 In any case, this definition extends to any five-dimensional theory in which there is a notion of a gauge field strength and therefore we expect that instanton operators can be extended to any formulation. 1For other attempts to formulate the (2, 0) theory, which have an explicit dependence upon the extra dimension, see for example [15–20]. 1 Along these lines, we will give evidence for how these local operators can be used in the maximally supersymmetric case to insert discrete units of six-dimensional momentum. As such they are crucial for the Lorentz symmetry enhancement to SO(1, 5) at strong coupling. Our discussion also touches upon the interesting topic of compactifying CFTs in the absence of a lagrangian description, and what this implies for the correlation functions. In particular, we hope to shed some light on how a 6D CFT with no free parameters or marginal operators can be related to an interacting 5D Yang-Mills theory. The rest of this note is organised as follows. In Section 2 we define instanton operators and explore some of their elementary properties. In Section 3 we then apply them to the case of maximally supersymmetric 5D Yang-Mills and show how they can lead to Lorentz symmetry enhancement. We briefly conclude in Section 4. 2 Instanton Operators We will define an instanton operator in analogy with monopole operators in three dimen- sions. In particular, we consider the Euclidean regime of the theory consisting of gauge fields A, scalars X and fermions ψ where (x ) . (x ) = [DXDADψ] (x ) . (x )e−S , (2.1) hO01 1 O0k k i O01 1 O0k k Z with the (x ) some local five-dimensional operators. We then introduce a new local O0i i operator (x), which modifies the boundary conditions of the gauge field at infinity via In the condition −S n(x) 01(x1) . 0k(xk) = [DXDADψ] 01(x1) . 0k(xk)e , 1 hI O O i Tr H 4 F ∧F =n O O Z 8π2 Sx (2.2) where S4 is an arbitrary four-sphere that surrounds the point x R5. In other words, x ∈ inserting (x) into a correlator instructs us to integrate over field configurations that In carry non-vanishing instanton number on the four-sphere surrounding the insertion point. First, we need to check that the fields obey the classical equations of motion near the insertion point. In fact, the classical solution corresponding to a single SO(5)-symmetric instanton operator for SU(2) gauge group was considered long ago in [11] by Yang, where it appears as a static soliton in six dimensions. A stringy embedding of the SU(N) gener- alisation was given later by Constable, Myers and Tafjord [21], in the context of D1 D5 ⊥ intersections. To construct such a solution one introduces spherical coordinates on Euclidean R5: 2 µ ν ds = δµν dx dx 2 2 i j = dr + r γijdθ dθ , (2.3) 2 with γij the metric on the four-sphere. We wish to solve the Yang-Mills equations µ D Fµν = 0 , D[µFνλ] = 0 , (2.4) but with non-vanishing 1 I = Tr F F , (2.5) 8π2 ∧ I over any given sphere of radius r centred about the origin. Note that since d Tr(F F ) = 0 , (2.6) ∧ we see that if I is evaluated on two spheres of radii r1 and r2 then Tr F F Tr F F = d Tr(F F ) = 0 , (2.7) ∧ − ∧ ∧ IS1 IS2 ZB12 where B12 is the ‘annulus’ region whose boundary is the two spheres of radii r1 and r2. Thus the topological charge I is constant along the radial direction. Since the size of the sphere grows as r4 we have that 1 F . (2.8) µν ∼ r2 Let us compute the Yang-Mills equations in spherical coordinates. To this end, note that the non-zero connection coefficients are 1 Γr = rγ , Γi = δi , Γk =γ ˆk , (2.9) ij − ij rj r j ij ij k whereγ ˆij are the connection coefficients for γij. The Yang-Mills equations become D F = D V D V r ij i j − j i D[iFjk] = 0 i D Vi = 0 2 1 D V + V + DjF = 0 , (2.10) r i r i r2 ji j 4 ij where Vi = Fri and D is the gauge-covariant derivative on S (with indices raised by γ ). The simplest solution to these equations is to set Ar = 0, Vi = 0 and ∂rAi = 0 so that j Fij simply satisfies the Yang-Mills equations on the four-sphere: D[iFjk] = 0 and D Fji = 0 with Fij independent of r. In fact this is exactly what we want. Note that in Cartesian coordinates we have ∂xµ ∂xν F = F . (2.11) ij ∂θi ∂θj µν 3 Now the change of variables between xµ and r, θi has the form: x0 = r cos θ1 x1 = r sin θ1 cos θ2 . x4 = r sin θ1 . sin θ4 . (2.12) Thus 1 F , (2.13) µν ∼ r2 as required. Solutions to the above equations can be straightforwardly constructed starting with the BPST instanton on R4 and stereographically projecting to S4; see e.g. Appendix B of [21]. Solutions for generic SU(N) gauge group can then be obtained by replacing the Pauli matrices with N N matrix representations of the su(2) algebra, such that [T , T ]= × i j 2iǫijkTk. Let us point out two amusing associated facts for the case of single instantons. First, the solutions on S4 satisfy 8ρ4 3 T 2 F F = i=1 i √γ d4θ . (2.14) ∧ 4 1+ ρ2 + (1P ρ2) cos θ1 − 1 Note that when ρ = 1, the coefficient collapses to 2 and yields an SO(5)-symmetric 3 2 expression.