Asymptotic Flatness and Holography

by Ioannis Papadimitriou (University of Swansea)

Tuesday 25 Nov 2008, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

The AdS/CFT dictionary for asymptotically locally Anti de Sitter spaces amounts to an identification of the field theory data, namely the sources of gauge-invariant operators and the renormalized one-point functions in the presence of sources, with the canonical variables of a suitable reduced phase space description of the bulk gravitational theory. I will argue that although such a dictionary may not be available yet in the case of spaces with different asymptotics, the description of the bulk theory in terms of an analogous reduced phase space parameterized by "renormalized" variables should always be possible. One can then use the structure of this phase space to infer the nature of the holographically dual theory, which may or may not be a local field theory. In this talk I will present recent work towards a reduced phase space description of asymptotically locally flat gravity. In particular, after giving a generalized definition of asymptotic flatness, I will explore the resulting structure of the holographic boundary of such spaces and discuss how this can be used to find a suitable parameterization of the reduced phase space.