Snowmass Theory Frontier Report
This report summarizes the recent progress and promising future directions in theoretical high-energy physics (HEP) identified within the Theory Frontier of the 2021 Snowmass Process.
arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to L. Rastelli.
This report summarizes the recent progress and promising future directions in theoretical high-energy physics (HEP) identified within the Theory Frontier of the 2021 Snowmass Process.
The non-renormalization of the 3-point functions $tr X^{k_1} tr X^{k_2} tr X^{k_3}$ of chiral primary operators in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory is one of the most striking facts to emerge from the AdS/CFT correspondence. A two-fold puzzle appears in the extremal case, e.g. k_1 = k_2 + k_3. First, the supergravity calculation involves analytic continuation in the k_i variables to define the product of a vanishing bulk coupling and an infinite integral over AdS. Second, extremal correlators are uniquely sensitive to mixing of the single-trace operators $tr X^k$ with protected multi-trace operators in the same representation of SU(4). We show that the calculation of extremal correlators from supergravity is subject to the same subtlety of regularization known for the 2-point functions, and we present a careful method which justifies the analytic continuation and shows that supergravity fields couple to single traces without admixture. We also study extremal n-point functions of chiral primary operators, and argue that Type IIB supergravity requires that their space-time form is a product of n-1 two-point functions (as in the free field approximation) multiplied by a non-renormalized coefficient. This non-renormalization property of extremal n-point functions is a new prediction of the AdS/CFT correspondence. As a byproduct of this work we obtain the cubic couplings $t ϕϕ$ and $s ϕϕ$ of fields in the dilaton and 5-sphere graviton towers of Type IIB supergravity on $AdS_5 \times S^5$.