Duke Physics

Senior Thesis

Superconformal Theories from Branes at Singularities

Chris E. Beasley

April 25, 1999

Thesis Committee: Ronen Plesser, Joshua Socolar

This page describes the work I did for my senior thesis in physics at Duke University. My advisor for this project was Prof. Ronen Plesser, and we worked in collaboration with Prof. Brian Greene and his student Calin Lazaroiu at Columbia University.

As the title suggests, my work involved the study of 3-dimensional solitonic objects known as "D3-branes" that live in type IIB string theory. Essentially, they are just places where open strings in the theory can end. They sweep out 4-dimensional worldvolumes which are embedded in the 6-dimensional space transverse to the branes.

At low energies, these branes are described by particular 4-dimensional gauge theories which depend on the geometry of the 6-dimensional space transverse to the branes. I was able to compute certain features of these worldvolume field theories for the case that the branes sit on particularly interesting sorts of singularities. In turn, these worldvolume field theories are conjectured to be dual to particular supergravity theories in anti-deSitter backgrounds. I was able to compare aspects of my worldvolume theories (such as the global symmetries) to the corresponding supergravity theories to check this correspondence.

If you would like to see some details, you can read my thesis in postscript (about 1.6 MBytes) or in pdf (about 260 kBytes). If you have any questions or comments, you can also send me email at ceb5@phy.duke.edu.