Integrating out geometry: holographic Wilsonian RG and the membrane paradigm

We formulate a holographic Wilsonian renormalization group flow for strongly coupled systems with a gravity dual, motivated by the need to extract efficiently low energy behavior of such systems. Starting with field theories defined on a cut-off surface in a bulk spacetime, we propose that integrati...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Faulkner, Thomas, Liu, Hong, Rangamani, Mukund
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Spring Berlin/Heidelberg 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71822
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4911-3183
Description
Summary:We formulate a holographic Wilsonian renormalization group flow for strongly coupled systems with a gravity dual, motivated by the need to extract efficiently low energy behavior of such systems. Starting with field theories defined on a cut-off surface in a bulk spacetime, we propose that integrating out high energy modes in the field theory should correspond to integrating out a part of the bulk geometry. We describe how to carry out this procedure in practice in the classical gravity approximation using examples of scalar and vector fields. By integrating out bulk degrees of freedom all the way to a black hole horizon, this formulation defines a refined version of the black hole membrane paradigm. Furthermore, it also provides a derivation of the semi-holographic description of low energy physics.