Holographic Renormalization of general dilaton-axion gravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a systematic method for holographic renormalization of general dilaton-axion gravity in various dimensions, applicable to a wide range of asymptotic backgrounds including non-conformal cases.

Contribution

It introduces a new iterative algorithm for solving the radial Hamilton-Jacobi equation and derives boundary terms valid for diverse asymptotics, extending holographic renormalization techniques.

Findings

Derived boundary terms for general dilaton-axion systems.

Applied method to Improved Holographic QCD with arbitrary dilaton potential.

Proved holographic Ward identities in the context.

Abstract

We consider a very general dilaton-axion system coupled to Einstein-Hilbert gravity in arbitrary dimension and we carry out holographic renormalization for any dimension up to and including five dimensions. This is achieved by developing a new systematic algorithm for iteratively solving the radial Hamilton-Jacobi equation in a derivative expansion. The boundary term derived is valid not only for asymptotically AdS backgrounds, but also for more general asymptotics, including non-conformal branes and Improved Holographic QCD. In the second half of the paper, we apply the general result to Improved Holographic QCD with arbitrary dilaton potential. In particular, we derive the generalized Fefferman-Graham asymptotic expansions and provide a proof of the holographic Ward identities.