ABJ quadrality

Abstract

We study physical consequences of adding orientifolds to the ABJ triality, which is among 3d mathcal{N}=6 superconformal Chern-Simons theory known as ABJ theory, type IIA string in AdS4 × ℂℙ3 and mathcal{N}=6 supersymmetric (SUSY) Vasiliev higher spin theory in AdS4. After adding the orientifolds, it is known that the gauge group of the ABJ theory becomes O(N1) × USp(2N2) while the background of the string theory is replaced by AdS4 × ℂℙ3/Z2, and the supersymmetries in the both theories reduce to mathcal{N}=5 . We propose that adding the orientifolds to the mathcal{N}=6 Vasiliev theory leads to mathcal{N}=5 SUSY Vasiliev theory. It turns out that the mathcal{N}=5 case is more involved because there are two formulations of the mathcal{N}=5 Vasiliev theory with either O or USp internal symmetry. We show that the two mathcal{N}=5 Vasiliev theories can be understood as certain projections of the mathcal{N}=6 Vasiliev theory, which we identify with the orientifold projections in the Vasiliev theory. We conjecture that the O(N1) × USp(2N2) ABJ theory has the two vector model like limits: N2 ≫ N1 and N1 ≫ N2 which correspond to the semi-classical mathcal{N}=5 Vasiliev theories with O(N1) and USp(2N2) internal symmetries respectively. These correspondences together with the standard AdS/CFT correspondence comprise the ABJ quadrality among the mathcal{N}=5 ABJ theory, string/M-theory and two mathcal{N}=5 Vasliev theories. We provide a precise holographic dictionary for the correspondences by comparing correlation functions of stress tensor and flavor currents. Our conjecture is supported by various evidence such as agreements of the spectra, one-loop free energies and SUSY enhancement on the both sides. We also predict the leading free energy of the mathcal{N}=5 Vasiliev theory from the CFT side. As a byproduct, we give a derivation of the relation between the parity violating phase in the mathcal{N}=6 Vasiliev theory and the parameters in the mathcal{N}=6 ABJ theory, which was conjectured in [1].