A Comparative Note on Tunneling in AdS and in its Boundary Matrix Dual

For charged black hole, within the grand canonical ensemble, the decay rate from thermal AdS to the black hole at a fixed high temperature increases with the chemical potential. We check that this feature is well captured by a phenomenological matrix model expected to describe its strongly coupled dual. This comparison is made by explicitly constructing the kink and bounce solutions around the de-confinement transition and evaluating the matrix model effective potential on the solutions.

Black Hole Partition Function using Hybrid Formalism of Superstrings

The type IIA superstring partition function Z_IIA on the euclidean attractor geometry AdS_2 x S^2 x CY_3, computes the modified elliptic genus Z_BH of the associated black hole. The hybrid formalism of superstrings defined as a conformally invariant sigma model on the coset supermanifold PSU(1,1|2)/U(1)xU(1), together with Calabi-Yau and chiral boson CFTs, is used to calculate Z_IIA. The sigma model action on AdS_2 x S^2 is explicitly written in U(1)xU(1) invariant variables. The N=2 generators of AdS_2 x S^2 x CY_3 are enlarged and embedded in an N=4 topological algebra. The world sheet superconformal invariance is then used to construct a nilpotent BRST operator, in contrast to the kappa symmetry analysis used by Beasely et. al. in hep-th/0608021. The sigma model action is explicitly shown to be closed under this BRST operator. Localization arguments are then used to deform the world sheet path integral with the addition of a BRST exact term, where, contributions arise only from the center of AdS_2 and, the north and south poles of S^2. This leads to the OSV result Z_BH = Z_IIA = |Z_top|^2, where |Z_top|^2 is the square of the topological string partition function.

Brane Embeddings in AdS_4 x CP^3

We construct D-brane embeddings in AdS_4 x CP^3 by studying the consistency conditions following from the pull back of target space equations of motion. We explicitly discuss the supersymmetry preserved by these embeddings by analyzing the compatibility of kappa symmetry projections with the target space Killing spinors in each case. The embeddings correspond to AdS/dCFT dualities involving a CFT with a defect. We also comment on the defect CFT.