Séminaire de Physique Théorique
Holographic RG flows on curved manifolds and the F-theoremElias Kiritsis (Université Paris 7)
Thursday 29 November 2018 14:00 - Tours - Salle 1180 (Bât E2)
Résumé :
We study F-functions in the context of field theories on S3 using gauge-gravity duality, with the radius of S3playing the role of RG scale. We show that the on-shell action, evaluated over a set of holographic RG flow solutions, can be used to define good F-functions, which decrease monotonically along the RG flow from the UV to the IR for a wide range of examples. If the operator perturbing the UV CFT has dimension Δ>3/2 these F-functions correspond to an appropriately renormalized free energy. If instead the perturbing operator has dimension Δ<3/2 it is the quantum effective potential, i.e. the Legendre transform of the free energy, which gives rise to good F-functions. We check that these observations hold beyond holography for the case of a free fermion on S3 (Δ=2) and the free boson on S3 (Δ=1), resolving a long-standing problem regarding the non-monotonicity of the free energy for the free massive scalar. We also show that for a particular choice of entangling surface, we can define good F-functions from an entanglement entropy, which coincide with certain F-functions obtained from the on-shell action.
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