D-branes in Yang-Mills theory and Emergent Gauge Symmetry

Four-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory on a sphere has highly charged baryon-like states built from anti-symmetric combinations of the adjoint scalars. We show that these states, which are equivalently described as holes in a free fermi sea of a reduced matrix model, are D-branes. Their excitations are stringlike and effectively realize Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions in various directions. The low energy brane dynamics should realize an emergent gauge theory that is local on a new space. We show that the Gauss' Law associated to this emergent gauge symmetry appears from combinatorial identities relating the stringy excitations. Although these excitations are not BPS, they can be near-BPS and we can hope to study them in perturbation theory. Accordingly, we show that the Chan-Paton factors expected for strings propagating on multiple branes arise dynamically, allowing the emergent gauge symmetry to be non-Abelian.