Holographic Renormalization of general dilaton-axion gravity

We consider a very general dilaton-axion system coupled to Einstein-Hilbert gravity in arbitrary dimension and we carry out holographic renormalization for any dimension up to and including five dimensions. This is achieved by developing a new systematic algorithm for iteratively solving the radial Hamilton-Jacobi equation in a derivative expansion. The boundary term derived is valid not only for asymptotically AdS backgrounds, but also for more general asymptotics, including non-conformal branes and Improved Holographic QCD. In the second half of the paper, we apply the general result to Improved Holographic QCD with arbitrary dilaton potential. In particular, we derive the generalized Fefferman-Graham asymptotic expansions and provide a proof of the holographic Ward identities.Comment: 42 pages. v2: two references added. Version published in JHEP. v3: fixed minor typos in eqs. (1.6), (2.3), (3.20), (A.3), (B.8), (B.12) and (B.22

Positivity of energy for asymptotically locally AdS spacetimes

We derive necessary conditions for the spinorial Witten-Nester energy to be well-defined for asymptotically locally AdS spacetimes. We find that the conformal boundary should admit a spinor satisfying certain differential conditions and in odd dimensions the boundary metric should be conformally Einstein. We show that these conditions are satisfied by asymptotically AdS spacetimes. The gravitational energy (obtained using the holographic stress energy tensor) and the spinorial energy are equal in even dimensions and differ by a bounded quantity related to the conformal anomaly in odd dimensions.Comment: 36 pages, 1 figure; minor corrections, JHEP versio

Hamilton-Jacobi method for Domain Walls and Cosmologies

We use Hamiltonian methods to study curved domain walls and cosmologies. This leads naturally to first order equations for all domain walls and cosmologies foliated by slices of maximal symmetry. For Minkowski and AdS-sliced domain walls (flat and closed FLRW cosmologies) we recover a recent result concerning their (pseudo)supersymmetry. We show how domain-wall stability is consistent with the instability of adS vacua that violate the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We also explore the relationship to Hamilton-Jacobi theory and compute the wave-function of a 3-dimensional closed universe evolving towards de Sitter spacetime.Comment: 18 pages; v2: typos corrected, one ref added, version to appear in PR

First Law, Counterterms and Kerr-AdS_5 Black Holes

We apply the counterterm subtraction technique to calculate the action and other quantities for the Kerr--AdS black hole in five dimensions using two boundary metrics; the Einstein universe and rotating Einstein universe with arbitrary angular velocity. In both cases, the resulting thermodynamic quantities satisfy the first law of thermodynamics. We point out that the reason for the violation of the first law in previous calculations is that the rotating Einstein universe, used as a boundary metric, was rotating with an angular velocity that depends on the black hole rotation parameter. Using a new coordinate system with a boundary metric that has an arbitrary angular velocity, one can show that the resulting physical quantities satisfy the first law.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Anatomy of bubbling solutions

We present a comprehensive analysis of holography for the bubbling solutions of Lin-Lunin-Maldacena. These solutions are uniquely determined by a coloring of a 2-plane, which was argued to correspond to the phase space of free fermions. We show that in general this phase space distribution does not determine fully the 1/2 BPS state of N=4 SYM that the gravitational solution is dual to, but it does determine it enough so that vevs of all single trace 1/2 BPS operators in that state are uniquely determined to leading order in the large N limit. These are precisely the vevs encoded in the asymptotics of the LLM solutions. We extract these vevs for operators up to dimension 4 using holographic renormalization and KK holography and show exact agreement with the field theory expressions.Comment: 67 pages, 6 figures; v2: typos corrected, refs added; v3: expanded explanations, more typos correcte

Settling Some Open Problems on 2-Player Symmetric Nash Equilibria

Over the years, researchers have studied the complexity of several decision versions of Nash equilibrium in (symmetric) two-player games (bimatrix games). To the best of our knowledge, the last remaining open problem of this sort is the following; it was stated by Papadimitriou in 2007: find a non-symmetric Nash equilibrium (NE) in a symmetric game. We show that this problem is NP-complete and the problem of counting the number of non-symmetric NE in a symmetric game is #P-complete. In 2005, Kannan and Theobald defined the "rank of a bimatrix game" represented by matrices (A, B) to be rank(A+B) and asked whether a NE can be computed in rank 1 games in polynomial time. Observe that the rank 0 case is precisely the zero sum case, for which a polynomial time algorithm follows from von Neumann's reduction of such games to linear programming. In 2011, Adsul et. al. obtained an algorithm for rank 1 games; however, it does not solve the case of symmetric rank 1 games. We resolve this problem

The holographic quantum effective potential at finite temperature and density

We develop a formalism that allows the computation of the quantum effective potential of a scalar order parameter in a class of holographic theories at finite temperature and charge density. The effective potential is a valuable tool for studying the ground state of the theory, symmetry breaking patterns and phase transitions. We derive general formulae for the effective potential and apply them to determine the phase transition temperature and density in the scaling region.Comment: 27 page