Hofman, Diego and Iqbal, Nabil (2018) 'Generalized global symmetries and holography.', SciPost physics., 4 (1). 005.
Abstract
We study the holographic duals of four-dimensional field theories with 1-form global symmetries, both discrete and continuous. Such higher-form global symmetries are associated with antisymmetric tensor gauge fields in the bulk. Various different realizations are possible: we demonstrate that a Maxwell action for the bulk antisymmetric gauge field results in a non-conformal field theory with a marginally running double-trace coupling. We explore its hydrodynamic behavior at finite temperature and make contact with recent symmetry-based formulations of magnetohydrodynamics. We also argue that discrete global symmetries on the boundary are dual to discrete gauge theories in the bulk. Such gauge theories have a bulk Chern-Simons description: we clarify the conventional 0-form case and work out the 1-form case. Depending on boundary conditions, such discrete symmetries may be embedded in continuous higher-form symmetries that are spontaneously broken. We study the resulting boundary Goldstone mode, which in the 1-form case may be thought of as a boundary photon. Our results clarify how the global form of the field theory gauge group is encoded in holography. Finally, we study the interplay of Maxwell and Chern-Simons terms put together. We work out the operator content and demonstrate the existence of new backreacted anisotropic scaling solutions that carry higher-form charge.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (610Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.4.1.005 |
Publisher statement: | Copyright D. M. Hofman and N. Iqbal. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
Date accepted: | 18 January 2018 |
Date deposited: | 07 March 2018 |
Date of first online publication: | 29 January 2018 |
Date first made open access: | No date available |
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