Partially Massless Higher-Spin Theory II: One-Loop Effective Actions

TL;DR

This paper extends higher-spin theory to include partially massless fields, computes one-loop effective actions in various dimensions, and provides evidence for the theory's UV completeness and a duality map to boundary CFT parameters.

Contribution

It generalizes higher-spin equations to include partially massless fields and computes detailed one-loop effective actions across multiple dimensions, revealing new insights into the duality and UV properties.

Findings

Effective actions computed for D=7 to 19 and D=4 to 8.

Evidence supporting UV completeness and one-loop exactness.

Proposed duality map between inverse Newton's constant and CFT color number.

Abstract

We continue our study of a generalization of the D-dimensional linearized Vasiliev higher-spin equations to include a tower of partially massless (PM) fields. We compute one-loop effective actions by evaluating zeta functions for both the "minimal" and "non-minimal" parity-even versions of the theory. Specifically, we compute the log-divergent part of the effective action in odd-dimensional Euclidean AdS spaces for D=7 through 19 (dual to the a-type conformal anomaly of the dual boundary theory), and the finite part of the effective action in even-dimensional Euclidean AdS spaces for D=4 through 8 (dual to the free energy on a sphere of the dual boundary theory). We pay special attention to the case D=4, where module mixings occur in the dual field theory and subtlety arises in the one-loop computation. The results provide evidence that the theory is UV complete and one-loop exact, and we conjecture and provide evidence for a map between the inverse Newton's constant of the partially massless higher-spin theory and the number of colors in the dual CFT.