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A Holographic Constraint on Scale Separation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-05 v2

Abstract

We propose a new consistency condition for the compatibility of a gravitational effective field theory in AdS with a dual holographic description in terms of a family of large-NN CFTs. Using large-NN factorization of correlation functions combined with a properly defined notion of single- and multi-particle operators, we argue that the cubic scalar bulk couplings for fields dual to operators with extremal arrangements of the conformal dimensions, i.e. Δi=Δj+Δk\Delta_i=\Delta_j+\Delta_k, should vanish. We apply this criterion to the 4d N=1\mathcal{N}=1 effective supergravity theory describing the simplest DGKT AdS4_4 vacua in type IIA string theory and show that it is non-trivially satisfied. In addition, we calculate explicitly all non-vanishing three-point correlation functions of low-lying scalar operators in the putative 3d CFTs dual to these AdS4_4 string theory backgrounds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.11031,
  title  = {A Holographic Constraint on Scale Separation},
  author = {Nikolay Bobev and Hynek Paul and Filippo Revello},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.11031},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages + appendices | v2: minor typos and a small error in eqs. (11)-(12) fixed, published version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:21:16.681Z