Anomaly holography

Abstract

We consider, in the effective field theory context, anomalies of gauge field theories on a slice of a five-dimensional, anti-de Sitter geometry and their four-dimensional, holographic duals. A consistent effective field theory description can always be found, notwithstanding the presence of the anomalies and without modifying the degrees of freedom of the theory. If anomalies do not vanish, the d = 4 theory contains additional pseudoscalar states, which are either present in the low-energy theory as physical, light states, or are eaten by (would-be massless) gauge bosons. We show that the pseudoscalars ensure that global anomalies of the four-dimensional dual satisfy the 't Hooft matching condition and comment on the relevance for warped models of electroweak symmetry breaking.