String Theory Seminars

Big crunch singularities in AdS and relevant deformations of CFT's

by Dr. Vladislav Vaganov (Swansea University, UK)

Wednesday, August 24, 2016 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at A304
Description
The AdS gravity dual of a CFT on de Sitter spacetime with a relevant deformation (mass term) contains a cosmological curvature singularity (big crunch).  The field theory can equivalently be viewed as a CFT on the Einstein static universe deformed by a time-dependent mass diverging at finite time.  If we can understand the signature(s) of the crunch in the QFT, we may eventually be able to understand the resolution of the crunch in the bulk by stringy or quantum effects via the holographic dictionary.  In this talk I will give an introduction to this topic and describe some recent work.