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The Thermal Free Energy in Large N Chern-Simons-Matter Theories


  Ran Yacoby  
 The Wizmann Institute of Science

I will describe the computation of the thermal free energy in large N U(N) Chern-Simons-matter theories with matter fields (scalars and/or fermions) in the fundamental representation, in the large temperature limit. This free energy was computed exactly recently though the results were found to be inconsistent with conjectured dualities between Chern-Simons-matter theories. It turns out that in these theories the eigenvalue distribution of the holonomy of the gauge field along the thermal circle does not localize even at very high temperatures, and this affects the computation significantly. When one includes this effect, the results for the free energy are found to be consistent with the conjectured dualities between Chern-Simons-matter theories with scalar fields and with fermion fields, as well as with the strong-weak coupling duality of the N=2 supersymmetric Chern-Simons-matter theory.