19.03.2025 (Wednesday)

QFTs on AdS

Regular Seminar Elias Kiritsis (Crete U.)

at:
15:30 KCL
room S0.12
abstract:

I will provide a rather lengthy introduction in oder to highlight interest in exploring QFts on AdS spaces (without dynamical gravity). The aspects involve the dyanmics of boundaries and interfaces in normal QFTs in flat space, the actual dynamics of confining gauge theories on AdS, the question of prximity in the pace of QFRTs, a more general notion of holography and its connection to S-matrices and finally Euclidean wormholes. All these issues will connect in the effort to describe holographic QFTs on AdS. We shall investigate in a concrete example how the related classical solutions explore the space of QFTs and we construct the general solutions that interpolate between the same or different CFTs with arbitrary couplings. The solution space contains many exotic RG flow solutions that realize unusual asymptotics, as boundaries of different regions in the space of solutions. We find phenomena like "walking" flows and the generation of extra boundaries via "flow fragmentation". We will then move on and describe an example of a holographic theory that confines on flat space, when we put it on AdS. We will find three types of regular solutions are found. Theories with two AdS boundaries provide interfaces between two confining theories. Theories with a single AdS boundary correspond to ground states of a single confining theory on AdS. We find solutions without a boundary, whose interpretation is probably as interfaces between topological theories. We analyze in detail the holographic dictionary for the one-boundary solutions and compute the free energy. No (quantum) phase transitions are found when we change the curvature. We find an infinite number of pure vev solutions, but no CFT solution without a vev. We also compute the free energy of the interface solutions. We find that the product saddle points have always lower free energy than the connected solutions. Finally we will comment on the spectrum of propa gating states of holographic theories on AdS and dS.