D5-brane boundary reflection factors

Abstract

We compute the strong coupling limit of the boundary reflection factor for excitations on open strings attached to various kinds of D5-branes that probe AdS5 x S5. We study the crossing equation, which constrains the boundary reflection factor, and propose that some solutions will give the boundary reflection factors for all values of the coupling. Our proposal passes various checks in the strong coupling limit by comparison with diverse explicit string theory computations. In some of the cases we consider, the D5-branes correspond to 1/2 BPS Wilson loops in the k-th rank antisymmetric representation of the dual field theory. In the other cases they correspond in the dual field theory to the addition of a fundamental hypermultiplet in a defect.