Supersymmetric gauge theories, Coulomb gases and Chern-Simons matrix models

Abstract

We develop Coulomb gas pictures of strong and weak coupling regimes of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in five and four dimensions. By relating them to the matrix models that arise in Chern-Simons theory, we compute their free energies in the large N limit and establish relationships between the respective gauge theories. We use these correspondences to rederive the N3 behavior of the perturbative free energy of supersymmetric gauge theory on certain toric Sasaki-Einstein five-manifolds, and the one-loop thermal free energy of N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on a spatial three-sphere.