Super Yang-Mills theories with inhomogeneous mass deformations

Abstract

We construct the 4-dimensional mathcal{N}=frac{1}{2} and mathcal{N} = 1 inhomogeneously mass-deformed super Yang-Mills theories from the mathcal{N} = 1* and mathcal{N} = 2* theories, respectively, and analyse their supersymmetric vacua. The inhomogeneity is attributed to the dependence of background fluxes in the type IIB supergravity on a single spatial coordinate. This gives rise to inhomogeneous mass functions in the mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills theory which describes the dynamics of D3-branes. The Killing spinor equations for those inhomogeneous theories lead to the supersymmetric vacuum equation and a boundary condition. We investigate two types of solutions in the mathcal{N}=frac{1}{2} theory, corresponding to the cases of asymptotically constant mass functions and periodic mass functions. For the former case, the boundary condition gives a relation between the parameters of two possibly distinct vacua at the asymptotic boundaries. Brane interpretations for corresponding vacuum solutions in type IIB supergravity are also discussed. For the latter case, we obtain explicit forms of the periodic vacuum solutions.