Multi-Trace Deformations in AdS/CFT: Exploring the Vacuum Structure of the Deformed CFT

Mar, 2007
41 pages
Published in:
  • JHEP 05 (2007) 075
e-Print:
Report number:
  • DESY-06-218,
  • ZMP-HH-06-17

Citations per year

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Abstract:
We present a general and systematic treatment of multi-trace deformations in the AdS/CFT correspondence in the large N limit, pointing out and clarifying subtleties relating to the formulation of the boundary value problem on a conformal boundary. We then apply this method to study multi-trace deformations in the presence of a scalar VEV, which requires the coupling to gravity to be taken into account. We show that supergravity solutions subject to `mixed' boundary conditions are in one-to-one correspondence with critical points of the holographic effective action of the dual theory in the presence of a multi-trace deformation, and we find a number of new exact analytic solutions involving a minimally or conformally coupled scalar field satisfying `mixed' boundary conditions. These include the generalization to any dimension of the instanton solution recently found in hep-th/0611315. Finally, we provide a systematic method for computing the holographic effective action in the presence of a multi-trace deformation in a derivative expansion away from the conformal vacuum using Hamilton-Jacobi theory. Requiring that this effective action exists and is bounded from below reproduces recent results on the stability of the AdS vacuum in the presence of `mixed' boundary conditions.
  • space-time: anti-de Sitter
  • field theory: conformal
  • field theory: deformation
  • vacuum state
  • expansion 1/N
  • Klein-Gordon equation
  • boundary condition
  • effective action
  • instanton
  • Hamilton-Jacobi equation