Sphalerons, Merons, and Unstable Branes in AdS

We construct unstable classical solutions of Yang-Mills theories and their dual unstable states of type IIB on AdS5. An example is the unstable D0-brane of type IIB located at the center of AdS. This has a field theory dual which is a sphaleron in gauge theories on S3 × R. We argue that the two are dual because both are sphalerons associated to the topology of the instanton/D-instanton. This agreement provides a non-supersymmetric test of the AdS/CFT duality. As an illustration, many aspects of Sen’s hypothesis regarding the unstable branes can be seen easily in the weakly coupled dual field theory description. In Euclidean AdS the D0-branes are dual to gauge theory merons. This implies that the two ends of a D0-brane world-line carry half the charge of a D-instanton. Other examples involve unstable strings in the Coulomb phase.