English

Operator Dictionaries and Wave Functions in AdS/CFT and dS/CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-04-22 v2

Abstract

Dual AdS/CFT correlators can be computed in two ways: differentiate the bulk partition function with respect to boundary conditions, or extrapolate bulk correlation functions to the boundary. These dictionaries were conjectured to be equivalent by Banks, Douglas, Horowitz, and Martinec. We revisit this question at the level of bulk path integrals, showing that agreement in the presence of interactions requires careful treatment of the renormalization of bulk composite operators. By contrast, we emphasize that proposed dS/CFT analogues of the two dictionaries are inequivalent. Next, we show quite generally that the wave function for Euclidean AdS analytically continues to the dS wave function with Euclidean initial conditions. Most of our arguments consider interacting fields on a fixed background, but in a final section we discuss the inclusion of bulk dynamical gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1104.2621,
  title  = {Operator Dictionaries and Wave Functions in AdS/CFT and dS/CFT},
  author = {Daniel Harlow and Douglas Stanford},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.2621},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

21 pages plus appendices, 6 figures, typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:53:46.774Z