On Holographic Weyl Anomaly

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic method to derive the conformal anomaly in various spacetime dimensions within the AdS/CFT framework, explicitly constructing bulk metrics and matter fields from boundary CFT data.

Contribution

It provides a holographic construction of bulk spacetime and matter fields from boundary sources, explicitly deriving conformal anomalies for gravity coupled to scalar fields in any dimension.

Findings

Explicit holographic derivation of conformal anomalies in any dimension.

Construction of bulk fields from boundary conformal data.

Identification of anomalies as coefficients of infrared divergences.

Abstract

We use the relation between certain diffeomorphisms in the bulk and Weyl transformations on the boundary to build the conformal structure of the metric in the presence of matter in the bulk. We explicitly obtain the conformal anomaly in any spacetime dimension d in a holographic frame work in the case of gravity coupled to the scalar fields. This way we also provide a holographic construction of the bulk spacetime metric and of the matter fields in the bulk of this spacetime out of sources that are related to conformal field theory data. With the latter, we produce an asymptotic expansion of the bulk fields and scalar fields near the boundary in terms of spacetime dimension in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We work out both the gravitational and matter conformal anomalies of the boundary theory as a coefficient of the infrared logarithmic divergence that appears in the on-shell action.