Research Projects

The AdS/CFT correspondence is one of the most important insights into the workings of quantum gravity to emerge in recent decades. However, it remains a conjecture: the explicit mapping between bulk and boundary degrees of freedom is still an open problem. This lack of understanding also hinders attempts to generalise the holography dictionary to more physically relevant spacetimes, such as Minkowski or de-Sitter. Chiral higher-spin gravity (XHS) theories provide a valuable toy model for exploring these questions. Unlike string theory, they are more tightly constrained by symmetry; and unlike the full (Vasiliev) higher-spin gravity, they are believed to be local —though at the expense of unitarity. Based on their relation to Vasiliev theories, their CFT duals are expected to arise from suitable truncations of Chern–Simons-matter (CSM) theories. This project aims to identify the CFT duals of XHS theories; and to study the AdS/CFT map in this simplified setting. Ultimately, we hope to leverage strong symmetry constraints to gain analytic control over both sides of the correspondence, and thereby shed light on the structure of the holographic map itself.