English

Conical Defects in Higher Spin Theories

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-03 v1

Abstract

We study conical defect geometries in the SL(N) Chern-Simons formulation of higher spin gauge theories in AdS_3. We argue that (for N\geq 4) there are special values of the deficit angle for which these geometries are actually smooth configurations of the underlying theory. We also exhibit a gauge in which these geometries can be viewed as wormholes interpolating between two distinct asymptotically AdS_3 spacetimes. Remarkably, the spectrum of smooth SL(N,C) solutions, after an appropriate analytic continuation, exactly matches that of the so-called "light primaries" in the minimal model W_N CFTs at finite N. This gives a candidate bulk interpretation of the latter states in the holographic duality proposed in [1].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.3381,
  title  = {Conical Defects in Higher Spin Theories},
  author = {Alejandra Castro and Rajesh Gopakumar and Michael Gutperle and Joris Raeymaekers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.3381},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

38 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:36:04.443Z