Canonical coordinates and meson spectra for scalar deformed N = 4 SYM from the AdS/CFT correspondence

Two points on the Coulomb branch of N = 4 super Yang Mills are investigated using their supergravity duals. By switching on condensates for the scalars in the N = 4 multiplet with a form which preserves a subgroup of the original R-symmetry, disk and sphere configurations of D3-branes are formed in the dual supergravity background. The analytic, canonical metric for these geometries is formulated and the singularity structure is studied. Quarks are introduced into the corresponding field theories using D7-brane probes and the meson spectrum is calculated. For one of the condensate configurations, a mass gap is found and shown analytically to be present in the massless limit. It is also found that there is a stepped spectrum with eigenstate degeneracy in the limit of small quark masses and this result is shown analytically. In the second, similar deformation it is necessary to understand the full D3-D7 brane interaction to study the limit of small quark masses. For quark masses larger than the condensate scale the spectrum is calculated and shown to be discrete as expected