Monodromy Defects in Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories from Holography
Authors
Andrea Conti
Ricardo Stuardo
Abstract
We study three Type II supergravity solutions which are holographically dual to codimension-2 supersymmetric defects in $(p+1)$-dimensional SU($N$) maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills ($p=2,3,4$). In all of these cases, the defects have a non-trivial monodromy for the maximal abelian subgroup for the SO($9-p$) R-symmetry. Such solutions are obtained by considering branes wrapping spindle configurations, changing the parameters (which alters the coordinate domain), and imposing suitable boundary conditions. We provide a prescription to compute the entanglement entropy of the effective theory on the defect. We find the resulting quantity to be proportional to the free energy of the ambient theory. Similar analysis is performed for the D5-brane wrapping a spindle, but we find that changing the coordinate domain does not lead to a defect solution, but rather a circle compactification.
