Gravity duals of half-BPS Wilson loops

Abstract

We explicitly construct the fully back-reacted half-BPS solutions in Type IIB supergravity which are dual to Wilson loops with 16 supersymmetries in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills. In a first part, we use the methods of a companion paper to derive the exact general solution of the half-BPS equations on the space $AdS_2 \times S^2 \times S^4 \times \Sigma$, with isometry group $SO(2,1)\times SO(3) \times SO(5)$ in terms of two locally harmonic functions on a Riemann surface $\Sigma$ with boundary. These solutions, generally, have varying dilaton and axion, and non-vanishing 3-form fluxes. In a second part, we impose regularity and topology conditions. These non-singular solutions may be parametrized by a genus $g \geq 0$ hyperelliptic surface $\Sigma$, all of whose branch points lie on the real line. Each genus $g$ solution has only a single asymptotic $AdS_5 \times S^5$ region, but exhibits $g$ homology 3-spheres, and an extra $g$ homology 5-spheres, carrying respectively RR 3-form and RR 5-form charges. For genus 0, we recover $AdS_5 \times S^5$ with 3 free parameters, while for genus $g \geq 1$, the solution has $2g+5$ free parameters. The genus 1 case is studied in detail. Numerical analysis is used to show that the solutions are regular throughout the $g=1$ parameter space. Collapse of a branch cut on $\Sigma$ subtending either a homology 3-sphere or a homology 5-sphere is non-singular and yields the genus $g-1$ solution. This behavior is precisely expected of a proper dual to a Wilson loop in gauge theory.