Anatomy of bubbling solutions

Abstract

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