Conical Defects in Higher Spin Theories

This paper established a groundbreaking result in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) gravity coupled to massless higher spin fields in three dimensions. It was found that these theories have a rich spectrum of smooth soliton-like solutions, which can be viewed as conical defects resolved by the higher spins. What is especially exciting about these solutions is that their quantum numbers are in beautiful agreement with those of certain states in a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) in the appropriate classical limit. Hence the result provided precision evidence for a recently proposed AdS/CFT correspondence for higher spin gravity.

A. Castro, R. Gopakumar, M. Gutperle and J. Raeymaekers, JHEP 1202, 096 (2012).