Bounds on the local energy density of holographic CFTs from bulk geometry

TL;DR

This paper derives bounds on the local energy density in holographic 2+1 dimensional CFTs by analyzing bulk geometries, revealing conditions under which the energy density is constrained to be positive or negative based on topology and scalar deformations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to constrain local energy densities in holographic CFTs using bulk geometry and extends previous results to include scalar deformations and various topologies.

Findings

Local energy density integrated over certain boundary domains can be negative.

For spherical topology with non-constant curvature, energy density must be positive somewhere.

Vacuum states with toroidal topology correspond to zero-temperature toroidal black holes.

Abstract

The stress tensor is a basic local operator in any field theory; in the context of AdS/CFT, it is the operator which is dual to the bulk geometry itself. Here we exploit this feature by using the bulk geometry to place constraints on the local energy density in static states of holographic $(2+1)$-dimensional CFTs living on a closed (but otherwise generally curved) spatial geometry. We allow for the presence of a marginal scalar deformation, dual to a massless scalar field in the bulk. For certain vacuum states in which the bulk geometry is well-behaved at zero temperature, we find that the bulk equations of motion imply that the local energy density integrated over specific boundary domains is negative. In the absence of scalar deformations, we use the inverse mean curvature flow to show that if the CFT spatial geometry has spherical topology but non-constant curvature, the local energy density must be positive somewhere. This result extends to other topologies, but only for certain types of vacuum; in particular, for a generic toroidal boundary, the vacuum's bulk dual must be the zero-temperature limit of a toroidal black hole.