In the reduction of 4d dualities to 3d there are non-perturbative effects arising from monopoles acting as instantons. This mechanism has been reproduced in string theory by engineering the theories in a IIA brane setup. Nevertheless there are limiti
ng cases of the 4d dualities where the dual theories are actually confined phases of the UV gauge theories. In these cases the monopoles are absent and the mechanism of reduction of the 4d duality has to be modified. In this paper we investigate such modification in the brane setup. The main observation behind our analysis is that in the 4d case the superpotential of the confined theories can been obtained also as the exotic contribution of a D0 brane, a stringy instanton. When considering these configurations we reproduce the field theory results in the brane setup. We study both the unitary and the symplectic case. As a further check we study the reduction of the 4d superconformal index to the 3d partition function for these theories.
We study two well-known classes of dualities in three dimensional N=2 supersymmetric field theories. In the first class there are non trivial interactions involving monopole operators while in the second class the dual gauge theories have Chern-Simon
s terms in the action. An RG flows connecting the first dual pair to the second one has been studied in the past and tested on the partition function on the squashed three sphere. Recently an opposite RG flow connecting the second dual pair to the first one has been studied in the case of unitary gauge groups. In this paper we study this flow on the partition function on the squashed three sphere. We verify that the equality between the partition functions of the original dual models is preserved in the IR, where the other dual pair is reached. We generalize the analysis to the case of symplectic and of orthogonal groups.
Recently it was argued that the exact R charge for three dimensional N=2 supersymmetric field theories extremizes the partition function localized on S^3. In this paper we check this conjecture by computing the R charge for SU(N)_k YM CS gauge theori
es at large k for many representations, and we test the agreement with the perturbative results.
We study supersymmetry breaking metastable vacua arising from beta deformed quiver gauge theories. The relation between the bounds on metastability and the deformation are discussed. Metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua are found in the IR of beta
deformed cascading quivers with vector-like field content. Furthermore the limiting case of massive Nf=Nc SQCD appears in the IR of gauge theories with chiral-like field content. We comment on the field theory origin of the deformation and on possible applications in AdS/CFT.
We study the phenomenon of additional light waves (ALWs), observed in crystal optics: two or more electromagnetic waves with the same polarization, but different refractive index, propagate simultaneously in a isotropic medium. We show that ALWs are
common in relativistic hydrodynamics, and in particular in strongly coupled systems that admit a dual gravitational description, where the ALWs are dual to quasi normal modes in the AdS gravity. We study both the transverse and the longitudinal light wave propagation. In the longitudinal channel we find a transition between regimes with different number of excitonic resonances which resembles the transition to standard optics observed in crystals.
In recent years a very exciting and intense activity has been devoted to the understanding and construction of materials that enjoy exotic optical properties, such as a negative refractive index. Motivated by these experimental and theoretical develo
pments, we use the string-inspired idea of holography to study the electromagnetic response of a certain class of media: strongly coupled relativistic systems that admit a dual gravitational description. Our results indicate that this type of media generally have a negative refractive index. Moreover we observe that a negative refractive index could be a common feature of relativistic hydrodynamic systems at low frequencies.
We study the geometric interpretation of metastable vacua for systems of D3 branes at non isolated toric deformable singularities. Using the L^{aba} examples, we investigate the relations between the field theoretic susy breaking and restoration and the complex deformations of the CY singularities.
