Precision microstate counting for the entropy of wrapped M5-branes

Abstract

Abstract We study the large N expansion of twisted partition functions of 3d $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 superconformal field theories arising from N M5-branes wrapped on a hyperbolic 3- manifold, M3. Via the 3d-3d correspondence, the partition functions of these 3d $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 superconformal field theories are related to simple topological invariants on the 3-manifold. The partition functions can be expressed using only classical and one-loop perturbative invariants of PSL(N, ℂ) Chern-Simons theory around irreducible flat connections on M3. Using mathematical results on the asymptotics of the invariants, we compute the twisted partition functions in the large N limit including perturbative corrections to all orders in 1/N . Surprisingly, the perturbative expansion terminates at finite order. The leading part of the partition function is of order N3 and agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the dual black holes. The subleading part, in particular the log N -terms in the field theory partition function is found to precisely match the one-loop quantum corrections in the dual eleven dimensional supergravity. The field theory results of other terms in 1/N provide a stringent prediction for higher order corrections in the holographic dual, which is M-theory.