PHASED · Precision holography for strongly coupled dynamics

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Project objective

The AdS/CFT correspondence relates gravitational theories in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space to non-gravitational conformal field theories (CFTs) in one dimension lower. A key feature of such 'holographic' dualities is that when the gravitational theory is weakly coupled, and thus amenable to perturbative computations, the dual field theory is strongly coupled. As such, holography provides a precise mathematical framework to study field theories in a regime which is inaccessible to conventional QFT methods.Within this theoretical laboratory, I will focus on amplitudes and correlation functions. These are the basic physical observables in a QFT which encode information about the dynamics of the theory. In the past years, much effort went into the study of such ‘holographic correlators.' However, the theories studied to date have been highly constrained, relying crucially on conformal invariance and a high degree of supersymmetry, and are thus far from our real-world physics. To address this shortcoming, I will develop new tools to compute holographic correlators in setups which (i) break conformal invariance, and (ii) are less supersymmetric. This will be achieved by leveraging the rich interplay between established supergravity methods and modern CFT tools. This includes the use of consistent truncations to a tractable sub-sector of the full theory, and a novel approach to non-conformal setups based on an auxiliary AdS space. The expected outcomes of this project will substantially sharpen our holographic tools and enable us to apply this powerful framework to more realistic theories. Moreover, the obtained results will constitute rare examples of analytic calculations in strongly coupled QFTs, in particular non-conformal and less supersymmetric ones.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE · LausanneCoordinatorSwitzerland

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101264470