Holographic description of asymptotically AdS_2 collapse geometries

Abstract

The mapping between bulk supergravity fields in anti-de Sitter space and operators in the dual boundary conformal field theory usually relies heavily on the available global symmetries. In the present work, we study a generalization of this mapping to time dependent situations, for the simple case of collapsing shock waves in two spacetime dimensions. The construction makes use of analyticity of the conformal field theory and the properties of the asymptotic bulk geometry to reconstruct the non-analytic bulk observables. Many of the features of this construction are expected to apply to higher dimensional asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes and their conformal field theory duals.