Holographic Duality with a View Toward Many-Body Physics

Figure 1

The extra (radial) dimension of the bulk is the resolution scale of the field theory. The left figure indicates a series of block spin transformations labelled by a parameter . The right figure is a cartoon of AdS space, which organizes the field theory information in the same way. In this sense, the bulk picture is a hologram: excitations with different wavelengths get put in different places in the bulk image. The connection between these two pictures is pursued further in [15]. This paper contains a useful discussion of many features of the correspondence for those familiar with the real-space RG techniques developed recently from quantum information theory.