20 research outputs found
CFT dual of the AdS Dirichlet problem: Fluid/Gravity on cut-off surfaces
We study the gravitational Dirichlet problem in AdS spacetimes with a view to
understanding the boundary CFT interpretation. We define the problem as bulk
Einstein's equations with Dirichlet boundary conditions on fixed timelike
cut-off hypersurface. Using the fluid/gravity correspondence, we argue that one
can determine non-linear solutions to this problem in the long wavelength
regime. On the boundary we find a conformal fluid with Dirichlet constitutive
relations, viz., the fluid propagates on a `dynamical' background metric which
depends on the local fluid velocities and temperature. This boundary fluid can
be re-expressed as an emergent hypersurface fluid which is non-conformal but
has the same value of the shear viscosity as the boundary fluid. The
hypersurface dynamics arises as a collective effect, wherein effects of the
background are transmuted into the fluid degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we
demonstrate that this collective fluid is forced to be non-relativistic below a
critical cut-off radius in AdS to avoid acausal sound propagation with respect
to the hypersurface metric. We further go on to show how one can use this
set-up to embed the recent constructions of flat spacetime duals to
non-relativistic fluid dynamics into the AdS/CFT correspondence, arguing that a
version of the membrane paradigm arises naturally when the boundary fluid lives
on a background Galilean manifold.Comment: 71 pages, 2 figures. v2: Errors in bulk metrics dual to
non-relativistic fluids (both on cut-off surface and on the boundary) have
been corrected. New appendix with general results added. Fixed typos. 82
pages, 2 figure
The Cosmological Constant
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant.
Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology
in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its
magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity
(http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199