Taming Mass Gaps with Anti–de Sitter Space
Christian Copetti, Lorenzo Di Pietro, Ziming Ji, Shota Komatsu
Abstract
Anti-de Sitter space acts as an infrared cutoff for asymptotically free theories, allowing interpolation between a weakly coupled small-sized regime and a strongly coupled flat-space regime. We scrutinize the interpolation for theories in two dimensions from the perspective of boundary conformal theories. We show that the appearance of a singlet marginal operator destabilizes a gapless phase existing at a small size, triggering a boundary renormalization group flow to a gapped phase that smoothly connects to flat space. We conjecture a similar mechanism for confinement in gauge theories.
Topics & Concepts
PhysicsDe Sitter spaceSpace (punctuation)de Sitter invariant special relativityAnti-de Sitter spaceDe Sitter universeClassical mechanicsAstronomyUniverseComputer scienceOperating systemBlack Holes and Theoretical PhysicsCosmology and Gravitation TheoriesGeometric Analysis and Curvature Flows