Holographic duals of five-dimensional SCFTs on a Riemann surface

Authors: Ibrahima Bah, Achilleas Passias and Peter Weck Preprint number: UUITP-28/18 We study the twisted compactifications of five-dimensional Seiberg SCFTs, with SU_M(2) x E_{N_f+1} flavor symmetry, on a generic Riemann surface that preserves four supercharges.  The five-dimensional SCFTs are obtained from the decoupling limit of N D4-branes probing a geometry of N_f<8 D8-branes and an O8-plane.  In addition to the R-symmetry, we can also twist the flavor symmetry by turning on background flux on the Riemann surface.  In particular, in the string theory construction of the five-dimensional SCFTs, the background flux for the SU_M(2) has a geometric origin, similar to the topological twist of the R-symmetry.  We argue that the resulting low-energy three-dimensional theories describe the dynamics on the world-volume of the N D4-branes wrapped on the Riemann surface in the O8/D8 background.  The Riemann surface can be described as a curve in a Calabi-Yau three-fold that is a sum of two line bundles over it.  This allows for an explicit construction of AdS_4 solutions in massive IIA supergravity dual to the world-volume theories, thereby providing strong evidence that the three-dimensional SCFTs exist in the low-energy limit of the compactification of the five-dimensional SCFTs.  We compute observables such as the free energy and the scaling dimensions of operators dual to D2-brane probes; these have non-trivial dependence on the twist parameter for the U(1) in SU_M(2).  The free energy exhibits the N^{5/2} scaling that is emblematic of five-dimensional SCFTs.