English

Massive AdS Supergravitons and Holography

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-07-24 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

I compare two holographic mechanisms giving to the graviton a parametrically-small supersymmetric mass mgm_g in Anti-de Sitter spacetime. In the context of bi-metric gravity these mechanisms couple `weakly' two initially decoupled superconformal theories by: (i) turning on a double-trace deformation, or (ii) gauging a common global symmetry. Superconformal invariance restricts the number of Poincar\'e supercharges to NQ4N_Q\leq 4 for mechanism (i) and to NQ8N_Q\leq 8 for mechanism (ii), and the AdS dimension to D5D\leq 5. The putative effective supergravities are expected to break down in the mg0m_g\to 0 limit at an intermediate scale between mg m_g and mPlanckm_{\rm Planck}. In a recently-proposed microscopic embedding of mechanism (ii) in string theory I show that mg=0m_g=0 is at infinite distance in moduli space, and I relate the breakdown of the effective theory to the condensation of unprotected spin-2 excitations in the string-theoretic description of the `holographic bridge'. The phenomenon is invisible in the weakly-coupled CFT side. I conjecture that similar phenomena should be at work in all cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.05039,
  title  = {Massive AdS Supergravitons and Holography},
  author = {Constantin Bachas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.05039},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages, one figure. Minor corrections and amendments. Version to be published in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:04:43.377Z