Solitons and States

An exciting new direction in the AdS/CFT correspondence is the construction of smooth supergravity solutions which can be interpreted as the bulk spacetime description of specific pure states in the dual field theory. These geometries provide us with a new opportunity to study the relation between the bulk geometry and the field theory, as we can investigate how the differences between bulk solutions are reflected by the corresponding CFT states.

I have been involved in the study of such geometries in the AdS_3/CFT_2 case for several years now. In [1], we showed that there are asymptotically flat solutions that have a `near-core' limit which is global AdS_3 x S^3 x M. We identified these geometries with the CFT RR ground state with maximal angular momentum, which is related to the NSNS vacuum by spectral flow.

This work served as the prototype for a host of generalizations by a number of authors, but especially Lunin and Mathur and Lunin, Maldacena and Maoz. A nice review of this material is [2]. Recently, I have been involved in generalizations to construct non-supersymmetric solitons [3], and asymptotically AdS_5 solitons [4]. It is particularly exciting that we can explicitly identify non-supersymmetric geometries with dual CFT states; this may provide a unique opportunity to probe the AdS/CFT relation and the description of spacetime in this more general context.

[1] V. Balasubramanian, J. de Boer, E. Keski-Vakkuri and S.F. Ross, Supersymmetric conical defects: towards a string theoretic description of black hole formation, Phys. Rev. D 64:064011 (2001), hep-th/0011217.

[2] S. Mathur, The fuzzball proposal for black holes: an elementary review, Fortsch. Phys. 53:793-827 (2005), hep-th/0502050.

[3] V. Jejjala, O. Madden, S. F. Ross and G. Titchener, Non-supersymmetric smooth geometries and D1-D5-P bound states, hep-th/0504181.

[4] S. F. Ross, Non-supersymmetric asymptotically AdS_5 x S^5 smooth geometries, hep-th/0511090.