Monodromy defects in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories from holography

A bstract We study three Type II supergravity solutions holographically dual to codimension-2 supersymmetric defects in ( p + 1)-dimensional SU( N ) maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory ( p = 2, 3, 4). In all of these cases, the defects have a non-trivial monodromy for the maximal abelian subgroup of the SO(9 – p ) R-symmetry. Such solutions are obtained by considering branes wrapping spindle configurations, changing the parameters (which alters the coordinate domain), and imposing suitable boundary conditions. We provide a prescription to compute the entanglement entropy of the effective theory on the defect. We find the resulting quantity to be proportional to the free energy of the ambient theory. A similar analysis is performed for the D5-brane wrapping a spindle, but we find that changing the coordinate domain does not lead to a defect solution, but rather to a circle compactification.