Supergravity, D-brane Probes and thermal super Yang-Mills: a comparison

Abstract

A D3-brane probe in the context of AdS/CFT correspondence at finite temperature is considered. The supergravity predictions for the physical effective couplings of the world-volume gauge theory of the probe brane are compared to those calculated in one-loop perturbation theory in the thermal gauge theory. It is argued that when the Higgs expectation value is much larger than the temperature, the supergravity result must agree with perturbative thermal Yang-Mills. This provides a perturbative test of the Maldacena conjecture. Predictions for the running electric and magnetic effective couplings, beyond perturbation theory are also obtained. Phenomenological applications for universe-branes are discussed. In particular mechanisms are suggested for reducing the induced cosmological constant and naturally obtaining a varying speed of light and a consequent inflation on the universe brane.Comment: LaTeX, 23 pages, 4 eps figures; v2: Comparison with Tseytlin-Yankielowicz ammended. Extra discussion on reduced supersymmetry on branes added; v3: A few minor changes to improve presentation. Version published in JHEP10(1999)1