Non-perturbative aspects of gauge/gravity duality

Recently we provided a microscopic derivation of the exact supergravity profile for the twisted scalar field emitted by systems of fractional D3-branes at a Z₂ orbifold singularity. In this contribution we focus on a set-up supporting an N = 2 SYM theory with SU(2) gauge group and N_f = 4. We take into account the tower of D-instanton corrections to the source terms for the twisted scalar and find that the profile of the latter can be expressed in terms of the chiral ring elements of the gauge theory. We show how the twisted scalar, which at the perturbative level represents the gravity counterpart of the gauge coupling, at the non-perturbative level is related to the effective gauge coupling in an interestingly modified way.