A CFT perspective on gravitational dressing and bulk locality

Aitor Lewkowycz, Gustavo J. Turiaci, Herman Verlinde

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

33 Scopus citations

Abstract

We revisit the construction of local bulk operators in AdS/CFT with special focus on gravitational dressing and its consequences for bulk locality. Specializing to 2+1-dimensions, we investigate these issues via the proposed identification between bulk operators and cross-cap boundary states. We obtain explicit expressions for correlation functions of bulk fields with boundary stress tensor insertions, and find that they are free of non-local branch cuts but do have non-local poles. We recover the HKLL recipe for restoring bulk locality for interacting fields as the outcome of a natural CFT crossing condition. We show that, in a suitable gauge, the cross-cap states solve the bulk wave equation for general background geometries, and satisfy a conformal Ward identity analo-gous to a soft graviton theorem. Virasoro symmetry, the large N conformal bootstrap and the uniformization theorem all play a key role in our derivations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number4
JournalJournal of High Energy Physics
Volume2017
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2017

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Keywords

  • AdS-CFT Correspondence
  • Conformal Field Theory

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