Zachary Guralnik

Chiral symmetry breaking and pions in nonsupersymmetric gauge/gravity duals

We study gravity duals of large N non-supersymmetric gauge theories with matter in the fundamental representation by introducing a D7-brane probe into deformed AdS backgrounds. In particular, we consider a D7-brane probe in both the AdS Schwarzschild black hole solution and in the background found by Constable and Myers, which involves a non-constant dilaton and S^5 radius. Both these backgrounds exhibit confinement of fundamental matter and a discrete glueball and meson spectrum. We numerically compute the quark condensate and meson spectrum associated with these backgrounds. In the AdS-black hole background, a quark-bilinear condensate develops only at non-zero quark mass. We speculate on the existence of a third order phase transition at a critical quark mass where the D7 embedding undergoes a geometric transition. In the Constable-Myers background, we find a chiral symmetry breaking condensate as well as the associated Goldstone boson in the limit of small quark mass. The existence of the condensate ensures that the D7-brane never reaches the naked singularity at the origin of the deformed AdS space.

Four-dimensional superconformal theories with interacting boundaries or defects

We study four-dimensional superconformal field theories coupled to three-dimensional superconformal boundary or defect degrees of freedom. Starting with bulk

Intersecting D-3 branes and holography

\mathcal{N}=2,

Perturbative Instabilities on the Non-Commutative Torus, Morita Duality and Twisted Boundary Conditions

d=4

Spectral flow on the Higgs branch and AdS/CFT duality

theories, we construct Abelian models preserving

A world-volume perspective on the recombination of intersecting branes

\mathcal{N}=2,

A Gravity dual of chiral symmetry breaking

d=3

Strong coupling dynamics of the Higgs branch: Rolling a Higgs by collapsing an instanton

supersymmetry and the conformal symmetries under which the boundary/defect is invariant. We write the action, including the bulk terms, in