Towards testing the Maldacena conjecture with SDLCQ

Abstract We consider the Maldacena conjecture applied to the near horizon geometry of a D1-brane in the supergravity approximation and present numerical results of a test of the conjecture against the boundary field theory calculation using supersymmetric discrete light-cone quantization (SDLCQ). We present numerical results with approximately 1000 times as many states as we previously considered. These results support the Maldacena conjecture and are within 10–15% of the predicted numerical results in some regions. Our results are still not sufficient to demonstrate convergence, and, therefore, cannot be considered to a numerical proof of the conjecture. We present a method for using a “flavor” symmetry to greatly reduce the size of the basis and discuss a numerical method that we use which is particularly well suited for this type of matrix element calculation.