Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Holographic operator ordering?

Believe it or not, at the end of this week I will speak at a workshop on algebraic and constructive quantum field theory. And (I don't know which of these two facts is more surprising) I will advocate holography.

More specifically, I will argue that it seems that holography can be a successful approach to formulate effective low energy theories (similar to other methods like perturbation theory of weakly coupled quasi particles or minimal models). And I will present this as a challenge to the community at the workshop to show that the correlators computed with holographic methods indeed encode a QFT (according to your favorite set of rules, e.g. Whiteman or Osterwalder-Schrader). My [kudos to an anonymous reader for pointing out a typo] guess would be that this has a non-zero chance of being a possible approach to the construction of (new) models in that sense or alternatively to show that the axioms are violated (which would be even more interesting for holography).

In any case, I am currently preparing my slides (I will not be able to post those as I have stolen far too many pictures from the interwebs including the holographic doctor from Star Trek Voyager) and came up with the following question:

In a QFT, the order of insertions in a correlator matters (unless we fix an ordering like time ordering). How is that represented on the bulk side?

Does anybody have any insight about this?

3 comments:

Yegor said...

Do you want something like a real-time formalism? If yes, check the paper by Skenderis and van Rees http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.2909. They discuss how to reproduce all sorts of Lorentzian correlation functions.

Robert said...

Thanks Yegor, that seems indeed to be the relevant reference. In short: You get time ordered correlation functions by imposing the correct "vacuum at infinity" boundary conditions.

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