Ads₄/CFT₃ and Quantum Gravity
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AdS/CFT and quantum gravity Ioannis Lavdas To cite this version: Ioannis Lavdas. AdS/CFT and quantum gravity. Mathematical Physics [math-ph]. Université Paris sciences et lettres, 2019. English. NNT : 2019PSLEE041. tel-02966558 HAL Id: tel-02966558 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02966558 Submitted on 14 Oct 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Prepar´ ee´ a` l’Ecole´ Normale Superieure´ AdS4/CF T3 and Quantum Gravity Soutenue par Composition du jury : Ioannis Lavdas Costas BACHAS Le 03 octobre 2019 Ecole´ Normale Superieure Directeur de These Guillaume BOSSARD Ecole´ Polytechnique Membre du Jury o Ecole´ doctorale n 564 Elias KIRITSIS Universite´ Paris-Diderot et Universite´ de Rapporteur Physique en ˆIle-de-France Crete´ Michela PETRINI Sorbonne Universite´ President´ du Jury Nicholas WARNER University of Southern California Membre du Jury Specialit´ e´ Alberto ZAFFARONI Physique Theorique´ Universita´ Milano-Bicocca Rapporteur Contents Introduction 1 I 3d N = 4 Superconformal Theories and type IIB Supergravity Duals6 1 3d N = 4 Superconformal Theories7 1.1 N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theories in three dimensions..............7 1.2 Linear quivers and their Brane Realizations...................... 10 1.3 Moduli Space and Symmetries............................. 16 2 ˆ2 2 Holographic Duals: IIB Supergravity on AdS4 × S × S n Σ(2) 23 2.1 The supergravity solutions................................ 23 2.2 Holographic Dictionary................................. 28 II String Theory embeddings of Massive AdS4 Gravity and Bimetric Mod- els 30 3 Massive AdS4 gravity from String Theory 31 3.1 The holographic viewpoint................................ 31 3.2 Higgsing in Representation theory........................... 33 3.3 Massive spin-2 on AdS4 × M6 .............................. 35 3.4 Conclusions and perspectives.............................. 44 4 Stringy AdS4 Bigravity 45 4.1 Introduction........................................ 45 4.2 Partitions for good quivers................................ 47 4.3 Quantum gates as box moves.............................. 50 4.4 Geometry of the gates.................................. 52 4.5 Mixing of the gravitons................................. 56 4.6 Bimetric and Massive AdS4 gravity........................... 60 4.7 Concluding Remarks................................... 62 ρˆ III Tρ [SU(N)] Superconformal Manifolds 63 5 Exactly marginal Deformations 64 5.1 Introduction........................................ 64 ρˆ 5.2 Superconformal index of Tρ [SU(N)].......................... 67 5.3 Characters of OSp(4|4) and Hilbert series....................... 70 5.4 Calculation of the index................................. 73 5.5 Counting the N = 2 moduli............................... 82 i Appendix 89 A Elements of representation theory for 3d N = 2 and N = 4 theories 90 B The supersymmetric Janus solution 93 C Combinatorics of linear quivers 95 D Index and plethystic exponentials 98 E Superconformal index of T [SU(2)] 101 E.1 Analytical computation of the index.......................... 101 E.2 T [SU(2)] index as holomorphic blocks......................... 105 Bibliography 108 ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Costas Bachas. I have been working under his supervision since I was a master student, until now that the circle of the Ph.D finally closed. His guidance over these years has been valuable and enlightening, I have learned a lot and had the great honour of writing my first papers with him. He has always been extremely patient and understanding with the various difficulties I have encountered in my work and I have benefited a lot from our discussions. His help, support and and guidance at the stage of my postdoctoral applications and during the preparation of my thesis have been extremely valuable. I am deeply grateful to him. Moreover, I would like to thank Jean Iliopoulos for the interesting discussions we had, for his help during my master thesis and for his help and guidance during my postdoctoral applications. I would like to thank Elias Kiritsis and Alberto Zaffaroni for accepting to be rapporteurs of my thesis, and for devoting time to read and correct my manuscript. I thank Guillaume Bossard, Michela Petrini and Nicholas Warner for accepting to be in my PhD committee. Moreover I would like to thank Guillaume Bossard and Giusepe Policastro for being members of my Ph.D monitoring committee and for the Interesting and helpful meetings we had. This thesis was carried out at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique of Ecole´ Normale Superieure. I would like to thank all the members of the lab for the interesting discussions and the great and stimulating environment. I would like to thank Bruno Le Floch for his extremely valuable help during the last year of my thesis. For the time he devoted to our long meetings and discussions, for being always available for my questions and for his great help in our projects. Of course I would like to thank Sandrine Pattacchini and Ouissem Trabelsi, for the excellent administrative support. Finally, I would like to thank, my colleagues and officemates, Dongsheng Ge, Zhihao Duan, Tony Jin, Alexandre Krajenbrinck and Deliiang Zhong. Three years ago we started this academic stage together and we shared all the parts of this experience. iii Introduction and Summary The development of holographic duality [6][93] has been highly effective and substantial in addressing major problems in theoretical particle physics. The significance of this development relies on the establishment of the connection between weakly and strongly coupled theories. This fact allows the study of long standing questions on quantum gravitational phenomena , gives access to the strong coupling regime of quantum field theories, while it allows for the study of non-perturbative string theory through weakly coupled gauge theories. Regarding quantum field theory, enormous progress has been achieved with the use of powerful computational techniques based on supersymmetry which allow for obtaining exact results for supersymmetric observables. One of the leading exact result methods in gauge theories is the one of supersymmetric localization [114][99], which relies on reducing an infinite dimensional path integral to a finite-dimensional integral. This method has found application in supersymmetric gauge theories in various dimensions with some notable mentions being the two-dimensional N = (2, 2) theories (partition function on round and squashed S2 [27][60][70]), three-dimensional N = 2 theories [79] (supersymmetric Wilson loops in Chern-Simons matter theories) and the four-dimensional N = 2 theories (Localization on round S4[99], Nekrasov partition function [96]). The theoretical background of this work is the holographic duality between three-dimensional N = 4 superconformal theories and type IIB supergravity on the warped background AdS4 ×w M6 , where the six-dimensional manifold is comprised by two two-spheres wraped over a two- 2 ˆ2 dimensional Riemann surface: S × S × Σ(2). Both the supergravity solutions and this class of superconformal theories have been subjects of intensive study and offer a rich ground for exploring various directions such as interesting dualities or new approaches to important questions in quantum gravity. This correspondence has been developed in [12][13] and has been tested throughout [14]. In the present work, we study specific questions in the theories of both sides of the aforementioned duality. The first main axis of this work regards the solutions of the gravitational side of the correspondence and in particular the study of massive N = 4 (super)gravity in four dimensional anti-de Sitter space. Relativistic theories of massive gravity [47][105][76][48], have received a great amount of attention over the last years among other theories of modified gravity. The question that lies in the core of these theories, is a long-standing one of theoretical physics and regards whether the graviton can obtain a mass. General relativity (GR), is an accurate and physically elegant theory of gravity at low ener- gies. It is given in terms of the Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action and describes the non-linear self- interactions of a massless spin-2 field. Modifications of gravity are mainly motivated by important questions in cosmology [50][37] , with the most significant being undoubtedly the cosmological constant problem [112]. Well promising directions are the ones where gravity is modified at large distances, or equivalently at low energies. An example of such an IR modification of gravity, is a theory of massive gravity. Consistently modifying GR into a theory of massive gravity would simply be based on adding a mass term for the graviton to the EH action so that in the limit of vanishing graviton mass (m → 0), GR would be recovered. Nevertheless, this logic hides sig- 1 nificant inconsistencies and pathologies. The first attempt of writing an action of a theory with a massive graviton, was made in [63]. Indeed, in this case, in the limit of vanishing