title: Designer gravity and field theory effective potentials.
abstract: Motivated by the anti-de Sitter conformal field theory correspondence, we show that there is remarkable agreement between static supergravity solutions and extrema of a field theory potential. For essentially any function V(alpha) there are boundary conditions in anti-de Sitter space so that gravitational solitons exist precisely at the extrema of V and have masses given by the value of V at these extrema. Based on this, we propose new positive energy conjectures. On the field theory side, each function V can be interpreted as the effective potential for a certain operator in the dual field theory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hertog
authors.forename: Gary T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Horowitz