What Do CFTs Tell Us About Anti-de Sitter Spacetimes?

There has recently been a revival of interest in anti de-Sitter space (AdS) brought about by the conjectured duality beteeen physics in the bulk of AdS and a conformal field theory on the boundary. Since the whole subject of branes, singletons and superconformal field theories on the AdS boundary was an active area of research about ten years ago, I begin with a historical review, including the ``Membrane at the end of the universe'' idea. Next I discuss two recent papers wit...

In this note we clarify the dictionary between pure quantum gravity on the bulk in the presence of a cosmological constant and a CFT on the boundary. We show for instance that there is a general correspondence between quantum gravity ``radial states'' and a pair of CFT's. Restricting to one CFT is argued to correspond to states possessing an asymptotic infinity. This point of view allows us to address the problem of reconstructing the bulk from the boundary. And in the second...

We construct an explicit bulk dual in anti-de Sitter space, with couplings of order $1/N$, for the $SU(N)$-singlet sector of QED in $d$ space-time dimensions ($2 < d < 4$) coupled to $N$ scalar fields. We begin from the bulk dual for the theory of $N$ complex free scalar fields that we constructed in our previous work, and couple this to $U(1)$ gauge fields living on the boundary in order to get the bulk dual of scalar QED (in which the $U(1)$ gauge fields become the boundary...

In this paper, we study the bulk local states in AdS/CFT correspondence in the large $N$ limit using the formula explicitly relating the bulk local operators and the CFT local operators. We identify the bulk local state in terms of CFT local states and find that the bulk local state corresponds to a CFT state supported in the whole space, which means a version of the subregion duality is not valid. On the other hand, CFT states supported in a space region are expressed in ter...

In this letter we use the Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence to establish a set of old conjectures about symmetries in quantum gravity. These are that no global symmetries are possible, that internal gauge symmetries must come with dynamical objects that transform in all irreducible representations, and that internal gauge groups must be compact. These conjectures are not obviously true from a bulk perspective, they are nontrivial consequences of t...

We will study the AdS/CFT correspondence in an intermediate region between the strong form of this correspondence (string theory on AdS being dual to a boundary CFT), and the weak form of this correspondence (supergravity on AdS being dual to a boundary CFT). We will go beyond the supergravity approximation in the AdS by using the fact that strings have an extended structure. We will also calculate the CFT dual to such string corrections in the bulk, and demonstrate that they...

Recently, it has been proposed by Maldacena that large $N$ limits of certain conformal field theories in $d$ dimensions can be described in terms of supergravity (and string theory) on the product of $d+1$-dimensional $AdS$ space with a compact manifold. Here we elaborate on this idea and propose a precise correspondence between conformal field theory observables and those of supergravity: correlation functions in conformal field theory are given by the dependence of the supe...

We consider a time-dependent deformation of anti-de-Sitter (AdS) space-time which contains a cosmological "singularity" - a space-like region of high curvature. Making use of the AdS/CFT correspondence we can map the bulk dynamics onto the boundary. The boundary theory has a time dependent coupling constant which becomes small at times when the bulk space-time is highly curved. We investigate the propagation of small fluctuations of a test scalar field from early times before...

These lecture notes are intended to serve as an introduction to applied AdS/CFT with numerics for an audience of graduate students and others with little background in the subject. The presentation begins with a poor man's review of current status of quantum gravity, where AdS/CFT correspondence is believed to be the well formulated quantum gravity in the anti-de Sitter space. Then we present the basic ingredients in applied AdS/CFT and introduce the relevant numerics for sol...

We discuss classical gravitational aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, with the aim of obtaining a rigorous (mathematical) understanding of the semi-classical limit of the gravitational partition function. The paper surveys recent progress in the area, together with a selection of new results and open problems.