Precision Holography for 5D Super Yang-Mills

Abstract: We study 1/2-BPS Wilson loop (WL) operators in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (MSYM) on $\mathbf{S}^5$. Their vacuum expectation value (vev) can be computed exactly at large $N$ thanks to supersymmetric localization. The holographic dual to MSYM on $\mathbf{S}^5$ is geometrically realized by a stack of $N$ D4-branes with spherical worldvolume in ten dimensions. We compute the vev of the circular WL using holography by evaluating the partition function of a fundamental string in this background. Our focus is on the next-to-leading order correction to the string partition function which is composed of two parts; the dilaton coupling to the worldsheet and the one-loop fluctuations of the worldsheet itself. We face a variety of issues, some related to the presence of a non-constant dilaton, and others that are common to its AdS analogue. However, the universality of UV divergences as well as the importance of a proper choice of an IR regulator have been recently stressed in the literature. Inspired by this, we resolve our issues by first carefully treating the Weyl anomaly which receives contributions from the non-constant dilaton, and then by computing the ratio of our partition function and the one of a string in AdS$_4\times \mathbf{C}P^3$, which is dual to a 1/2-BPS WL in ABJM. Crucially, this approach yields a finite result which matches the corresponding ratio of WL vevs on the gauge theory side.