Perturbations around black holes have been an intriguing topic in the last few decades. They are particularly important today, since they relate to the gravitational wave observations which may provide the unique fingerprint of black holes’ existence. Besides the astrophysical interest, theoretically perturbations around black holes can be used as testing grounds to examine the proposed AdS/CFT...

We consider generic toric Tri-Sasakian 7-manifolds X7 in the context of Mtheory on AdS4 × X7 and study their AdS/CFT correspondence to N = 3 SCFT in 3D spacetime. We obtain volumes of Tri-Sasakian manifolds and their supersymmetric 5-cycles via cohomological integration technique, and use this to calculate conformal dimensions of baryonic operators in the SCFT side. We also propose quiver-type ...

We consider gauge theories with multitrace deformations in the context of certain AdS/CFT models with explicit breaking of conformal symmetry and supersymmetry. In particular, we study the standard four-dimensional confining model based on the D4-brane metric at finite temperature. We work in the self-consistent Hartree approximation, which becomes exact in the large-N limit and is equivalent t...

We discuss the link between string backgrounds and the associated world-sheet CFTs. In the search for new backgrounds and CFTs, Penrose limits and Lie algebra contractions are important tools. The Nappi-Witten construction and the recently discovered logarithmic CFT by Bakas and Sfetsos, are considered as illustrations. We also speculate on possible extensions. Based on invited talk presented a...

Assuming certain asymptotic conditions, we prove a general theorem on the non-existence of static regular black holes in spacetimes with a negative cosmological constant, given that the fundamental group of space is infinite. We use this to rule out the existence of regular negative mass AdS black holes with Ricci flat scri. For any mass, we also rule out a class of conformally compactifiable s...

We revive an old result, that one-loop corrections to the graviton propagator induce 1/r3 corrections to the Newtonian gravitational potential, and compute the coefficient due to closed loops of the U(N) N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory that arises in Maldacena’s AdS/CFT correspondence. We find exact agreement with the coefficient appearing in the Randall-Sundrum brane-world proposal. This provide...

We deform the AdS/CFT Correspondence by the inclusion of a non-supersymmetric scalar mass operator. We discuss the behaviour of the dual 5 dimensional supergravity field then lift the full solution to 10 dimensions. Brane probing the resulting background reveals a potential consistent with the operator we wished to insert. e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], n.evans@hep....

We study the holographic description of string theory in a plane wave spacetime by taking the Penrose limit of the usual AdS/CFT correspondence. We consider three-point functions with two BMN operators and one non-BMN operator; the latter should go over to a perturbation of the dual CFT. On the string side we take the Penrose limit of the metric perturbation produced by the non-BMN operator, an...

We extend the proposal for a detailed map between wrapped D-branes in Anti-de Sitter space and baryon-like operators in the associated dual conformal field theory provided in hep-th/0202150 to the recently formulated AdS4 × CP/ABJM correspondence. In this example, the role of the dibaryon operator of the 3dimensional CFT is played by a D4-brane wrapping a CP ⊂ CP. This topologically stable D-br...

Gravity in d dimensions is formulated as the gauge theory of local SO(2,d-1) gauge group. The Chern-Pontryagin index P2n plays a crucial role in both gravity and gauge theories. P2n(gravity) gives the gravitational Lagrangian in 2n dimensions, having the vacuum solution AdS2n. The same but global symmetry is shared with the gauge theories and 0,1-cochains of the Chern-Simon index C2n(gauge) tak...