Moduli dynamics as a predictive tool for thermal maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills at large N

Understand

Maximally supersymmetric (p+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills theory at large N and finite temperature, with possibly compact spatial directions, has a rich phase structure.

• Strongly coupled phases may have holographic descriptions as black branes in various string duality frames, or there may be no gravity dual.
• In this paper we provide tools in the gauge theory which give a simple and unified picture of the various strongly coupled phases, and transitions between them.
• Building on our previous work we consider the effective theory describing the moduli of the gauge theory, which can be computed precisely when it is weakly coupled far out on the Coulomb branch.