Conformal Operators for Partially Massless States

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of partially massless fields in AdS space and their boundary conformal field theory counterparts, highlighting potential physical relevance in de Sitter space due to negative norm issues.

Contribution

It introduces conformal operators for partially massless states and discusses their implications in AdS/CFT correspondence and de Sitter space.

Findings

Partially massless fields have fewer helicity states than massive fields.

Boundary conformal fields obey a specific conformally-invariant differential equation.

Partially massless fields may be more physically meaningful in de Sitter space.

Abstract

The AdS/CFT correspondence is explored for ``partially massless'' fields in AdS space (which have fewer helicity states than a massive field but more than a conventional massless field). Such fields correspond in the boundary conformal field theory to fields obeying a certain conformally-invariant differential equation that has been described by Eastwood et al. The first descendant of such a field is a conformal field of negative norm. Hence, partially massless fields may make more physical sense in de Sitter as opposed to Anti de Sitter space.