Holography, Fractals and the Weyl Anomaly

Abstract

We study the large source asymptotics of the generating functional in quantum field theory using the holographic renormalization group, and draw comparisons with the asymptotics of the Hopf characteristic function in fractal geometry. Based on the asymptotic behavior, we find a correspondence relating the Weyl anomaly and the fractal dimension of the Euclidean path integral measure. We are led to propose an equivalence between the logarithmic ultraviolet divergence of the Shannon entropy of this measure and the integrated Weyl anomaly, reminiscent of a known relation between logarithmic divergences of entanglement entropy and a central charge. It follows that the information dimension associated with the Euclidean path integral measure satisfies a c-theorem.