Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Physics

Advisor

Daniel N. Kabat

Subject Categories

Elementary Particles and Fields and String Theory | Other Physics

Keywords

AdS/ CFT, Black Holes, String Theory

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is threefold. We begin by the study of two parallel ideal cosmic strings in the presence of non-minimal scalar fields and spin- 1 gauge fields. We show that the contributions of the non-minimal term on the interaction energy between the strings are similar to that of the gauge field for a particular value of non-minimal coupling parameter. In this context we clarify some of the issues that arise when comparing the renormalization of black hole entropy and entanglement entropy using the replica trick.

In the second part of the dissertation we study the process of bound state formation in clusters of Dp- brane collision and Dp shell/ Membrane collapse processes. We consider two mechanisms for bound state formation. The first, operative at weak coupling in the worldvolume gauge theory, is creation of W-bosons. The second, operative at strong coupling, corresponds to formation of a black hole in the dual supergravity. These two processes agree qualitatively at intermediate coupling, in accord with the correspondence principle of Horowitz and Polchinski. We show that the size of the bound state and timescale for formation of a bound state agree at the correspondence point, along with other relevant thermodynamic quantities. The timescale involves matching a parametric resonance in the gauge theory to a quasinormal mode in supergravity.

Finally we study construction of local operators in AdS using the generalized AdS/ CFT correspondence. After briefly sketching previous works on this topic which involve massless and massive scalar fields, we present similar construction for spin- 1 and spin- 2 gauge fields. Working in holographic gauge in the bulk, at leading order in 1/N bulk gauge fields are obtained by smearing boundary currents over a sphere on the complexified boundary, while linearized metric fluctuations are obtained by smearing the boundary stress tensor over a ball. This representation respects AdS covariance up to a compensating gauge transformation. We also consider massive vector fields, where the bulk field is

obtained by smearing a non-conserved current. We compute bulk two-point functions and show that bulk locality is respected. We show how to include interactions of massive vectors using 1/N perturbation theory, and we comment on the issue of general backgrounds. We point out some more recent works on interacting scalar and gauge fields and try to answer the question of what should be the CFT properties to have a dual gravitational descriptions on AdS space. We end with some speculations about finite N and when we have black holes in the bulk.

Download

Share

COinS