On Continuum Effective Field Theories, Gravity and Holography

Abstract

We examine effective field theories (EFTs) with a continuum sector in the presence of gravity. We first explain, via arguments based on central charge and species scale, that an EFT with a free continuum cannot consistently couple to standard (i.e. 4D Einstein) gravity. It follows that EFTs with a free or nearly-free continuum must either have a finite number of degrees of freedom or nonstandard gravity. The latter claim is realized for holographically-defined continuum models. We demonstrate this by computing the deviations from standard gravity in a specific 5D scalar-gravity system that gives rise to a gapped continuum (i.e the linear dilaton background). We find an $R^{-2}$ deviation from the Newtonian potential. At finite temperature we find an energy density with matter-like behavior in the brane Friedmann equation, holographically induced from the bulk geometry. Thus, remarkably, a brane-world living in the linear dilaton background automatically contains dark matter. We also present a slightly more evolved asymptotically-AdS linear dilaton model, for which the deviations exhibit a transition between AdS and linear dilaton behaviors.

47 pages, 4 figures, v2: Minor text edits for clarity, references added, models in Sec. 5 updated, appendices added

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Cosmological Dark Matter from a Bulk Black Hole
• Holography of Linear Dilaton Spacetimes from the Bottom Up
• Holographic Fluids from 5D Dilaton Gravity
• Entanglement Entropy and Thermal Phase Transitions from Curvature Singularities
• Casimir Forces in CFT with Defects and Boundaries
• EFT & Species Scale: Friends or foes?
• Exploring Dark Forces with Multimessenger Studies of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals
• Limits on Kaluza-Klein Portal Dark Matter Models
• Physics with high-luminosity proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC
• Undecay