Time-dependent AdS/CFT duality II: holographic reconstruction of bulk metric and possible resolution of singularity

Abstract

We continue the studies of our earlier proposal for an AdS/CFT correspondence for time-dependent supergravity backgrounds. We note that by performing a suitable change of variables, the dual super Yang-Mills theory lives on a flat base space, and the time-dependence of the supergravity background is entirely encoded in the time-dependent couplings (gauge and axionic) and their supersymmetric completion. This form of the SYM allows a detailed perturbative analysis to be performed. In particular the one-loop Wilsonian effective action of the boundary SYM theory is computed. By using the holographic UV/IR relation, we propose a way to extract the bulk metric from the Wilsonian effective action; and we find that the bulk metric of our supergravity solutions can be reproduced precisely. While the bulk geometry can have various singularities such as geodesic incompleteness, gauge theory quantum effects can introduce higher derivative corrections in the effective action which can serve as a way to resolve the singularities.