Informal Pizza Seminar

Charge and Flux Quantization in Gravity Duals of Three Dimensional Gauge Theory

Peter Ouyang

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Much recent interest in gauge/gravity duality has focused on duals for highly supersymmetric field theories in 2+1 dimensions with Chern-Simons terms. In this talk I will revisit this correspondence, and argue from a variety of perspectives that the fluxes of the gravity dual must obey a subtle quantization condition which is shifted from the naive quantization by a half-integer. In particular, the shifted quantization is necessary for consistency with the existence of baryonic operators in the field theory after accounting for Freed-Witten global anomalies, and for consistency with brane constructions of the field theory.