On boundary conditions and spacetime/fibre duality in Vasiliev's higher-spin gravity

Abstract

This paper discusses some aspects of the Vasiliev system, beginning with a review of a recent proposal for an alternative perturbative scheme: solutions are built by means of a convenient choice of homotopy-contraction operator and subjected to asymptotically anti-de Sitter boundary conditions by perturbatively adjusting a gauge function and integration constants. At linear level the latter are fibre elements that encode, via unfolded equations, propagating massless fields of any spin. Therefore, linearized solution spaces, distinguished by their spacetime properties (regularity and boundary conditions), have parallels in the fibre. The traditional separation of different branches of linearized solutions via their spacetime features is reviewed, and their dual fibre characterization, as well as the arrangement of the corresponding fibre elements into AdS irreps, is illustrated. This construction is first reviewed for regular and singular solutions in compact basis, thereby capturing massless particles and static higher-spin black holes, and then extended to solutions in conformal basis, capturing bulk-to-boundary propagators and certain singular solutions with vanishing scaling dimension, related to boundary Green's functions. The non-unitary transformation between the two bases is recalled at the level of their fibre representatives.