Maximally supersymmetric RG flows and AdS duality

Abstract

We discuss four dimensional renormalization group flows which preserve sixteen supersymmetries. In the infra-red, these can be viewed as deformations of the N=4 superconformal fixed points by special, irrelevant operators. It is argued that the gauge coupling beta function continues to vanish identically, for all coupling constants and energy scales, for such RG flows. In addition, the dimensions of all operators in short supersymmetry representations are constant along such flows. It is conjectured that there is a generalization of the AdS/CFT holography correspondence which describes such flows, e.g. the D3 brane vacuum before taking the near-horizon limit, at all energy scales. RG flows in three and six dimensions, preserving 16 supersymmetries, are also briefly discussed, including a conjectured generalized AdS/CFT duality for the M2 and M5 brane cases. Finally, we discuss maximally supersymmetric RG flows associated with non-commutative geometry.