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We provide a first principles derivation of the supersymmetric Casimir energy of N = 1 SCFTs in four dimensions using the supercharge algebra on general conformal supergravity backgrounds that admit Killing spinors. The superconformal Ward identities imply that there exists a continuous family of conserved R-currents on supersymmetric backgrounds, as well as a continuous family of conserved currents for each conformal Killing vector. These continuous families interpolate between the consistent and covariant R-current and energy-momentum tensor. The resulting Casimir energy, therefore, depends on two continuous parameters corresponding to the choice of conserved currents used to define the energy and R-charge. This ambiguity is in addition to any possible scheme dependence due to local terms in the effective action. As an application, we evaluate the general expression for the supersymmetric Casimir energy we obtain on a family of backgrounds with the cylinder topology ℝ × S3 and admitting a single Majorana supercharge. Our result is a direct consequence of the supersymmetry algebra, yet it resembles more known expressions for the non-supersymmetric Casimir energy on such backgrounds and differs from the supersymmetric Casimir energy obtained from the zero temperature limit of supersymmetric partition functions. We defer a thorough analysis of the relation between these results to future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study spin-2 fluctuations around an infinite family of warped backgrounds of the form AdS2 × S2 × T4 × S1 × I ρ in the type IIB theory, which possesses N = 4 supersymmetry. We find that there exists a special set of solutions which is independent of the background data; the minimal universal class. This particular class of solutions corresponds to operators with scaling dimension ∆ = ℓ + 1, with ℓ being the quantum number of the angular-momentum on the S2. Using the mode solutions of these spin-2 states, we compute the central charge of the dual field theories. We comment on the relation of our results to the seed AdS3× S2× T4× I ρ backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compute a large collection of string worldsheet correlators describing light probes interacting with heavy black hole microstates. The heavy states consist of NS5 branes carrying momentum and/or fundamental string charge. In the fivebrane decoupling limit, worldsheet string theory on a family of such backgrounds is given by exactly solvable null-gauged WZW models. We construct physical vertex operators in these cosets, including all massless fluctuations. We compute a large class of novel heavy-light-light-heavy correlators in the AdS3 limit, where the light operators include those dual to chiral primaries of the holographically dual CFT. We compare a subset of these correlators to the holographic CFT at the symmetric product orbifold point, and find precise agreement in all cases, including for light operators in twisted sectors of the orbifold CFT. The agreement is highly non-trivial, and includes amplitudes that describe the analogue of Hawking radiation for these microstates. We further derive a formula for worldsheet correlators consisting of n light insertions on these backgrounds, and discuss which subset of these correlators are likely to be protected. As a test, we compute a heavy-light five-point function, obtaining precisely the same result both from the worldsheet and the symmetric orbifold CFT. This paper is a companion to and extension of [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employ a non-compact gauging of four-dimensional maximal supergravity to construct a two-parameter family of AdS4 J-fold solutions preserving N = 2 supersymmetry. All solutions preserve u (1) × u (1) global symmetry and in special limits we recover the previously known su (2) × u (1) invariant N = 2 and su (2) × su (2) invariant N = 4 J-fold solutions. This family of AdS4 backgrounds can be uplifted to type IIB string theory and is holographically dual to the conformal manifold of a class of three-dimensional S-fold SCFTs obtained from the N = 4 T [U(N)] theory of Gaiotto-Witten. We find the spectrum of supergravity excitations of the AdS4 solutions and use it to study how the operator spectrum of the three-dimensional SCFT depends on the exactly marginal couplings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We formulate the graviton propagator on de Sitter background in a 2-parameter family of simple gauges which break de Sitter invariance. Explicit results are derived for the first order perturbations in each parameter. These results should be useful in computations to check for gauge dependence of graviton loop corrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]