Comments on squashed-sphere partition functions

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Publication:1696296

DOI10.1007/JHEP07(2017)093zbMATH Open1380.81296arXiv1705.00292OpenAlexW2611918742WikidataQ60667861 ScholiaQ60667861MaRDI QIDQ1696296FDOQ1696296


Authors: Nikolay Bobev, Pablo Bueno, Yannick Vreys Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 14 February 2018

Published in: Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We study the partition function of odd-dimensional conformal field theories placed on spheres with a squashed metric. We establish that the round sphere provides a local extremum for the free energy which, in general, is not a global extremum. In addition, we show that the leading quadratic correction to the free energy around this extremum is proportional to the coefficient, CT, determining the two-point function of the energy-momentum tensor in the CFT. For three-dimensional CFTs, we compute explicitly this proportionality constant for a class of squashing deformations which preserve an SU(2)imesU(1) isometry group on the sphere. In addition, we evaluate the free energy as a function of the squashing parameter for theories of free bosons, free fermions, as well as CFTs holographically dual to Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We observe that, after suitable normalization, the dependence of the free energy on the squashing parameter for all these theories is nearly universal for a large region of parameter space and is well approximated by a simple quadratic function arising from holography. We generalize our results to five-dimensional CFTs and, in this context, we also study theories holographically dual to six-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet gravity.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.00292




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