PU High Energy Theory Seminar

This talk will be held in-person in Jadwin Hall, Room 202 (Chairs Conference Room) and on Zoom:
https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97248927011?pwd=SWFiNWFwZWE5SUR4OUxvV0ZacVdWQT09

Abstract: I make a surprising connection between two long-standing problems in higher-spin gravity: (1) locality concerns at the quartic order in perturbation theory, and (2) the physical meaning of the Didenko-Vasiliev "BPS black hole" solution.

I show that the Didenko-Vasiliev solution is dual to a bilocal single-trace operator in the holographically dual vector model, just like the string in standard AdS/CFT is dual to a Wilson line. This suggests that we should use these solutions as a "completion" of the space of on-shell higher-spin fields, much like the string "completes" its associated tower of particle species.

All n-point boundary correlators can then be constructed from (sufficiently local) cubic vertices, via a new string-like diagrammatic framework. Thus, the quartic locality problem is avoided, at the price of introducing a new bulk object. In the process, an infinite tower of unknown vertices in the standard formulation is replaced by a single unknown cubic vertex.