AdS N-body problem at large spin

by Dr Jeremy Mann (King's College)

Wednesday 25 Jun 2025, 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Berlin

It is widely believed that unitary CFTs in d>2 dimensions satisfy a "coarse" form of holography, where certain sectors of the CFT data are captured by an AdS effective field theory that is local at length scales much larger than the AdS radius. I will apply this idea to the spectrum of lowest-dimension operators at fixed charge and large spin, dual to lowest-energy multi-particle states in AdS. In this regime, particles are well separated and weakly interacting, allowing for a perturbative description of the spectrum as a quantum mechanical N-body problem on the hyperbolic disk. In this context, I will show that the large-spin limit is semiclassical for most states, with explicit predictions for the density of states and lowest-lying energies. Finally, I will comment on how the semiclassical description can be derived in CFTs directly using lightcone bootstrap. Based on 2412.12328 with Petr Kravchuk and further work in progress.