On the correspondence between gravity fields and CFT operators

Abstract

It is shown that a nonlinear derivative-dependent transformation of gravity fields changes correlation functions in a boundary CFT, and, therefore, corresponds to a change of a basis of operators in the CFT. It is argued that only non-renormalized structures in correlation functions can be changed by such a field transformation, and that the study of the response of correlation functions to gravity field transformations allows one to find them. In the case of 4-point functions of CPOs in SYM_4 several non-renormalized structures are found, including the extremal and subextremal ones. It is also checked that quartic couplings of scalar fields s^I that are dual to extended chiral primary operators vanish in the subextremal case, as dictated by the non-renormalization theorem for the subextremal 4-point functions and the AdS/CFT correspondence.