N=2 supersymmetric RG flows and the IIB dilaton Original

We show that there is a non-trivial relationship between the dilaton of IIB supergravity, and the coset of scalar fields in five-dimensional, gauged N=8 supergravity. This has important consequences for the running of the gauge coupling in massive perturbations of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We conjecture an exact analytic expression for the ten-dimensional dilaton in terms of five-dimensional quantities, and we test this conjecture. Specifically, we construct a family of solutions to IIB supergravity that preserve half of the supersymmetries, and are lifts of supersymmetric flows in five-dimensional, gauged N=8 supergravity. Via the AdS/CFT correspondence these flows correspond to softly broken N=4, large N Yang–Mills theory on part of the Coulomb branch of N=2 supersymmetric Yang–Mills. Our solutions involve non-trivial backgrounds for all the tensor gauge fields as well as for the dilaton and axion.