A Note on (Non)-Locality in Holographic Higher Spin Theories

Abstract

It was argued recently that the holographic higher spin theory features non-local interactions. We further elaborate on these results using the Mellin representation. The main difficulty previously encountered on this way is that the Mellin amplitude for the free theory correlator is ill-defined. To resolve this problem, instead of literally applying the standard definition, we propose to define this amplitude by linearity using decompositions, where each term has the associated Mellin amplitude well-defined. Up to a sign, the resulting amplitude is equal to the Mellin amplitude for the singular part of the quartic vertex in the bulk theory and, hence, can be used to analyze bulk locality. From this analysis we find that the scalar quartic self-interaction vertex in the holographic higher spin theory has a singularity of a special form, which can be distinguished from generic bulk exchanges. We briefly discuss the physical interpretation of such singularities and their relation to the Noether procedure.