general mechanisms
electric-magnetic duality, Montonen-Olive duality, geometric Langlands duality
string-fivebrane duality
string-QFT duality
QFT-QFT duality:
effective QFT incarnations of open/closed string duality,
relating (super-)gravity to (super-)Yang-Mills theory:
Seiberg duality (swapping NS5-branes)
What is called flat space holography is a – somewhat more hypothetical – generalization of the holographic principle in the form of the AdS-CFT correspondence, which should be applicable not to the usual bulk spacetimes that are asymptotically anti de Sitter, but to bulks that are asymptotically Minkowskian.
In order to still relate this to branes notice that the far horizon geometry of all BPS branes is a flat orbifold spacetime (see there), but that “far” is Planck scale for single branes (“cone branes”), hence in the large 1/N limit (opposite to the large N limit in which the AdS-CFT correspondence applies).
In one more well-developed version of flat space holography, scattering amplitudes in asymptotically flat spacetimes are related to conformal field theories on celestial spheres in two dimensions lower – “celestial amplitudes”. This goes back to an observation in de Boer & Solodukhin 2003.
Early comments:
Edward Witten, Baryons and Branes in Anti de Sitter Space talk at Strings98 (1998) [web]
(by the title, apparently originally intended to touch on AdS-QCD, but de facto ending with focus on the problem of flat space holography)
Dedicated introduction and survey:
Activities:
Original articles:
Leonard Susskind, Holography in the flat space limit, AIP Conf.Proc. 493 (1999) 1, 98-112, (spire, arXiv:hep-th/9901079, doi:10.1063/1.1301570)
(in relation to the BFSS matrix model)
Jan de Boer, Sergey N. Solodukhin, A holographic reduction of Minkowski space-time, Nucl. Phys. B665 (2003) 545-593 (arXiv:hep-th/0303006)
David Berenstein, A toy model for the AdS/CFT correspondence, JHEP 0407 (2004) 018 (arXiv:hep-th/0403110)
R. B. Mann, Flat space holography, Can. J. Phys. 86 (2008) 563-570 (spire:1119742, doi:10.1139/p07-188)
Arjun Bagchi, Daniel Grumiller, Holograms of Flat Space, International Journal of Modern Physics DVol. 22, No. 12, 1342003 (2013) (doi:10.1142/S0218271813420030)
Arjun Bagchi, Rudranil Basu, Ashish Kakkar, Aditya Mehra, Flat Holography: Aspects of the dual field theory, JHEP 12(2016)147 (arXiv:1609.06203)
Reza Fareghbal, Isa Mohammadi, Flat-space holography and correlators of Robinson–Trautman stress tensor, Annals of Physics Volume 411, December 2019, 167960 (doi:10.1016/j.aop.2019.167960)
For JT-gravity/SYK model-duality (i.e. analogous to AdS2/CFT1 duality):
On mass-deformation of the IKKT matrix model (analogous to how the BMN matrix model mass-deforms the BFSS matrix model) identified as flat space holographic dual to certain type IIB supergravity-solutions:
Shota Komatsu, Adrien Martina, João Penedones, Antoine Vuignier, Xiang Zhao: Einstein gravity from a matrix integral – Part I [arXiv:2410.18173]
Shota Komatsu, Adrien Martina, Joao Penedones, Antoine Vuignier, Xiang Zhao: Einstein gravity from a matrix integral – Part II [arXiv:2411.18678]
Introduction and survey:
Sabrina Pasterski, Lectures on Celestial Amplitudes, The European Physical Journal C 81 1062 (2021) [arXiv:2108.04801, doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09846-7]
Sabrina Pasterski, Celestial Amplitudes, talk at Strings 2021 [slides: pdf, video: YT]
Ana-Maria Raclariu, Lectures on Celestial Holography [arXiv:2107.02075]
Original articles:
(…)
Description in terms of topological strings on twistor space:
Kevin Costello, Natalie M. Paquette, Atul Sharma, Top-down holography in an asymptotically flat spacetime [arXiv:2208.14233]
Kevin Costello, Natalie M. Paquette, Atul Sharma, Burns space and holography [arXiv:2306.00940]
See also:
Niklas Garner, Natalie M. Paquette, Twistorial monopoles & chiral algebras [arXiv:2305.00049]
Arjun Bagchi, Arthur Lipstein, Mangesh Mandlik, Aditya Mehra. 3d Carrollian Chern-Simons theory and 2d Yang-Mills (2024). (arXiv:2407.13574).
Review:
Sabrina Pasterski, A Chapter on Celestial Holography, in Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics 2nd ed, [arXiv:2310.04932]
Laura Donnay, Celestial holography: An asymptotic symmetry perspective [arXiv:2310.12922]
Last revised on May 1, 2025 at 01:13:38. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.