On Type IIA Penrose Limit and N=6 Chern-Simons Theories

Understand

Recently, Aharony, Bergman, Jafferis and Maldacena proposed that the N=6 Chern-Simons gauge theories are holographically dual to the M-theory backgrounds with multiple M2-branes on orbifolds C^4/Z_k.

• When k is large, they have the type IIA string description.
• In this paper we analyze the Penrose limit of this IIA background and express the string spectrum as the conformal dimensions of operators in the gauge theories.
• For BPS operators, we can confirm the agreements between the IIA string on plane waves and the gauge theories.