Absorption by Branes and Schwinger Terms in the World Volume Theory

TL;DR

The paper shows that the leading low-energy absorption cross-section of gravitons polarized along D3-branes is controlled by the central term in the worldvolume stress-energy tensor correlator and that a 4D N=4 SYM non-renormalization protects this term, ensuring agreement with semiclassical gravity at all loop orders. It relates the cross-section to the trace anomaly via the central charge and Schwinger terms, arguing that the one-loop result is exact due to the Adler-Bardeen protection. The authors then extend this gravity–worldvolume correspondence to M2- and M5-branes, extracting scaling laws for the central charges c2 and c5 and providing explicit low-energy cross-sections, thereby inferring properties of their unkown worldvolume theories from gravity. Overall, the work strengthens the link between brane absorption phenomena and field-theoretic central charges, offering a general method to deduce Schwinger-term data from gravity computations.

Abstract

We study how coincident Dirichlet 3-branes absorb incident gravitons polarized along their world volume. We show that the absorption cross-section is determined by the central term in the correlator of two stress-energy tensors. The existence of a non-renormalization theorem for this central charge in four-dimensional N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories shows that the leading term at low energies in the absorption cross-section is not renormalized. This guarantees that the agreement of the cross-section with semiclassical supergravity, found in earlier work, survives all loop corrections. The connection between absorption of gravitons polarized along the brane and Schwinger terms in the stress-energy correlators of the world volume theory holds in general. We explore this connection to deduce some properties of the stress-energy tensor OPE's for 2-branes and 5-branes in 11 dimensions, as well as for 5-branes in 10 dimensions.