Comparing top-down and bottom-up holographic defects and boundaries

Abstract

In this work we consider domain walls and end-of-the-world branes in AdS/CFT, holographically dual to codimension-one conformal defects and conformal boundaries respectively. In this setting there is an analogue of the ``bulk point'' singularity in boundary correlation functions, which we use to compare top-down and bottom-up constructions of these systems. For example, for a range of parameters the D3/D5 boundary CFT cannot be imitated by a tensionful end-of-the-world brane coupled to Einstein gravity, and in another range it can be modeled with a negative tension brane. Along the way we compute the central charge $b$ for the M2/M5 boundary CFT.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: The light crossing time $\phi_{b}$ as a function of the parameter $\gamma$. The limit $\gamma=1$ corresponds to empty AdS.
• Figure 2: The light crossing time $\phi_{b}$ for the D3/D5 DCFT when the number of D3 branes does not jump across the defect.
• Figure 3: The light crossing time of the SUSY Janus deformation of $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM as a function of $\delta \phi$. The light crossing time tends to infinity at large $\delta\phi$.
• Figure 4: Plots of the normalized defect entropy $D_0/N_3^2$ in $d=4$ as a function of $\phi_b$. Note that the top-down defects only exist for $\phi_b\geq \pi$; here we plot the result for KR branes with $\phi_b\geq \pi$, equivalently positive tension.
• Figure 5: A comparison of normalized defect entropy in $d=2$ between D1/D5 SUSY Janus and the Karch-Randall model.