QG group meeting: What kind of RG is GR?

This is the weekly QG group meeting.
Speaker: Vasudev Shyam (visiting Ph.D. student).
Title: "What kind of RG is GR?"

One of the defining features of the Holographic duality is the geometrization of the renormalization group or in other words, the fact that the energy scale of the boundary quantum field theory plays the role of the radial direction of the holographic bulk dual. I will describe how this can be made consistent with the feature of local general covariance that the bulk gravity theory necessarily possesses. This is encoded in a peculiar response of the boundary quantum field theory to local changes of scale, which ensures that the radial direction is treated on equal footing with the other directions of space in the emergent bulk. I will then show that this reconciliation results in a criterion that selects theories that possess local holographic bulk duals. Also, I will show how the condition that ensures the emergence of bulk diffeomorphism invariance is precisely that which ensures the emergence of full conformal invariance at the ultraviolet fixed point, as opposed to mere scale invariance.