Thermodynamics of the localized D2-D6 system

An exact fully-localized extremal supergravity solution for N2 D2-branes and N6 D6-branes, which is dual to 3-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N2) gauge theory with N6 fundamentals, was found by Cherkis and Hashimoto. In order to consider the thermal properties of the gauge theory we present the non-extremal extension of this solution to first order in an expansion near the core of the D6-branes. We compute the Hawking temperature and the black-brane horizon area/entropy. The leading-order entropy, which is proportional to N23/2N61/2 TH2, is not corrected to first order in the expansion. This result is consistent with the analogous weak-coupling result at the correspondence point N2 ∼ N6. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.