D-PARTICLE RECOIL SPACE–TIMES AND "GLUEBALL" MASSES

Abstract

We discuss the properties of matter in a D-dimensional anti-de Sitter-type space–time induced dynamically by the recoil of a very heavy D(irichlet)-particle defect embedded in it. The particular form of the recoil geometry, which from a world sheet view point follows from logarithmic conformal field theory deformations of the pertinent sigma-models, results in the presence of both infrared and ultraviolet (spatial) cutoffs. These are crucial in ensuring the presence of mass gaps in scalar matter propagating in the D-particle recoil space–time. The analogy of this problem with the Liouville-string approach to QCD, suggested earlier by John Ellis and one of the present authors, prompts us to identify the resulting scalar masses with those obtained in the supergravity approach based on the Maldacena's conjecture, but without the imposition of any supersymmetry in our case. Within reasonable numerical uncertainties, we observe that agreement is obtained between the two approaches for a particular value of the ratio of the two cutoffs of the recoil geometry. Notably, our approach does not suffer from the ambiguities of the supergravity approach as regards the validity of the comparison of the glueball masses computed there with those obtained in the continuum limit of lattice gauge theories.