Holographic Renormalization of Gravity in Little String Theory Duals

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic renormalization procedure for gravity duals of little string theories, constructing counterterms to ensure finite actions and well-defined variational principles in linear dilaton backgrounds.

Contribution

It introduces a method to renormalize gravity actions in linear dilaton spacetimes, extending holographic techniques to little string theory duals.

Findings

Counterterms yield finite on-shell actions.

Boundary stress tensor and conserved charges computed.

Parallel with asymptotically flat spacetime methods demonstrated.

Abstract

We perform a holographic renormalization of gravity duals to little string theories. In particular, we construct counterterms which yield a well-defined type II action for NS-sector linear dilaton backgrounds. Our methods are based on a similar recent construction in asymptotically flat spacetimes, and our work demonstrates in detail the parallels between asymptotically flat and linear dilaton boundary conditions. The counterterms guarantee that (i) the on-shell action is finite and (ii) asymptotically linear dilaton solutions are stationary points of the action under all boundary condition preserving variations. We use the resulting action to compute a boundary stress tensor and the associated conserved charges.