I will talk about Yang-Mills theory on four dimensional Anti-de Sitter space. The Dirichlet boundary condition cannot exist at arbitrarily large radius because it would give rise to colored asymptotic states in flat space. This implies a deconfinement-confinement transition as the radius is increased. I will show hints on the nature of this transition obtained in 2407.06268 using perturbation theory. The results favor the scenario of merger and annihilation as the most promising candidate for the transition.

Based on 2306.05551 with Ankur and D. Carmi. Studying QFT in AdS allows to translate phenomena in massive QFT in the bulk to properties of the boundary conformal correlators. I will illustrate this in the example of a strongly coupled gauge theory, namely scalar QED in dimension D<4. The tool that I will use to compute is the large N expansion, where N is the number of flavors. I will show that the four-point function of the charged operator dual to the scalar electrons can be computed exactly in the coupling at leading order at large N, both in the Coulomb and in the Higgs phase, and explain its salient properties. Finally I will discuss an IR divergence present in integer dimension D=3 that signals the breaking of the AdS isometries due to a boundary running coupling.

In this talk I will discuss boundary RG flows for a 4d free scalar field coupled to large N vector models on a 3d boundary. These RG flows connect decoupled fixed points with the free and the critical vector model on the boundary, and they enjoy strong-weak dualities. I will also consider adding gauge fields to the setup. [Please email alejandro.cabo_bizet@kcl.ac.uk for the zoom link]