Title: Aspects of quantization in AdS/CFT
Description: We study features of a variety of quantum spectra involved in AdS/CFT correspondences. We first organize the states of free, large N, SU ( N ) Yang Mills theory on a sphere into a stringy spectrum by decomposing its thermal partition function into characters of the irreducible representations of the conformal group SO (4, 2). We also discuss the generalization of this procedure to finding the representation content of [Special characters omitted.] = 4 Super Yang Mills. Next, we quantize the space of 1/2 BPS configurations of Type IIB SUGRA found by Lin, Lunin and Maldacena [92], directly in supergravity. We use the Crnkovic-Witten-Zuckerman covariant quantization method to write down the expression for the symplectic structure on this entire space of solutions. We find that the explicit symplectic form around AdS 5 × S 5 is in precise agreement with the quantization of a system of N free fermions in a harmonic oscillator potential, as expected from AdS/CFT.

We then study the half-BPS mesonic chiral ring of the [Special characters omitted.] = 1 superconformal quiver theories arising from N D3-branes stacked at Y pq and L abc Calabi-Yau conical singularities. We write a partition function at finite N over mesonic half-BPS states. It agrees with the partition function obtained by quantizing the cohomologically trivial giant gravitons in the dual bulk geometry. The L aba cones have singular base geometries, and we find that their gauge duals contain extra operators which correspond to twisted states localized at the orbifold-like singularities in the bulk. Finally, we formulate the problem of counting 1/16 BPS states of [Special characters omitted.] = 4 Yang Mills theory in terms of the local cohomology of an operator acting on holomorphic fields on C 2 . We study, at finite N , the sector of this cohomology containing operators constructed out of covariant derivatives and scalars, and compare these states to states obtained from the quantization of giant gravitons and dual giants. We also derive a set of Bogomolnyi equations for BPS field configurations in [Special characters omitted.] = 4 Yang Mills theory on R 4 with reality properties and boundary conditions appropriate to radial quantization. An arbitrary solution to these equations in the free theory is parameterized by holomorphic data on C 2 and lifts to a nearby solution of the interacting Bogomolnyi equations only when the constraints equivalent to Q -cohomology are obeyed.