Notes On Higher Spin Symmetries

TL;DR

This paper investigates higher spin symmetries in the context of AdS/CFT, explicitly constructing boundary-to-bulk propagators and demonstrating how higher spin symmetries constrain boundary correlation functions.

Contribution

It provides explicit boundary-to-bulk propagators for higher spin fields and shows how higher spin symmetries determine boundary correlators up to finite parameters.

Findings

Higher spin symmetries fix correlation functions up to finite parameters

Explicit boundary-to-bulk propagators for higher spin fields are constructed

Bulk solutions correspond to boundary action deformations

Abstract

The strong form of the AdS/CFT correspondence implies that the leading $N$ expressions for the connected correlation functions of the gauge invariant operators in the free ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with the gauge group SU(N) correspond to the boundary S matrix of the classical interacting theory in the Anti de Sitter space. It was conjectured recently that the theory in the bulk should be a local theory of infinitely many higher spin fields. In this paper we study the free higher spin fields ($N=\infty$) corresponding to the free scalar fields on the boundary. We explicitly construct the boundary to bulk propagator for the higher spin fields and show that the classical solutions in the bulk are in one to one correspondence with the deformations of the free action on the boundary by the bilinear operators. We also discuss the constraints on the correlation functions following from the higher spin symmetry. We show that the higher spin symmetries fix the correlation functions up to the finite number of parameters. We formulate sufficient conditions for the bulk theory to reproduce the free field correlation functions on the boundary.