Holographic Correlators of Giant Gravitons in Monodromy Defects

TL;DR

The paper addresses holographic two-point functions of giant gravitons in $ N=4$ SYM with monodromy defects, modeling giant gravitons as charged geodesics in a 5d STU truncation of gauged supergravity. The calculation reveals two geodesic saddles: the standard U-shaped geodesic and a novel defect-anchored geodesic, whose sum yields the two-point function; the anchored saddle encodes the one-point function of $OO^{\dagger}$ in the defect background. The final result, valid to leading order in the defect parameters $\beta_I$, shows a defect-induced correction to the two-point function and a separate anchored contribution that dominates the one-point function in the coincidence limit, highlighting how monodromy defects imprint local data on holographic correlators. These findings offer a controlled setup to explore defect holography, potential conformal-block decompositions, and possible links to holographic symmetry operators, with implications for understanding defect degrees of freedom and their smoothing mechanisms at finite $N$.

Abstract

We compute holographically correlation functions for giant gravitons in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM in the presence of monodromy defects through probe branes. The computation boils down to the study of charged geodesics in certain five-dimensional gauged supergravity backgrounds. In addition to the standard U-shaped geodesic, in the presence of the defect, we find an extra, novel, contribution from a geodesic anchored at the defect which captures the one-point function of the square of the giant graviton.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Cartoon of the anchored geodesic.
• Figure 2: Cartoon of the instability. The orange tube is the bubbled D3 which breaks the brane.