UCLA

In this dissertation, we explore 1/2-BPS conformal defects that are holographically realized as a warped product of anti-de Sitter spacetime and a circle in gauged supergravity. These solutions can be obtained as the double analytic continuation of BPS black holes with hyperbolic horizons. Observables including the expectation value of the defect and one-point functions of fields in the presence of the defect are calculated.

In Chapter 1, we present a brief review of the AdS/CFT correspondence and its supergravity approximation together with an introduction to conformal defects. In Chapter 2, we construct a singular spacetime in pure D = 4, N = 2 gauged supergravity dual to a 1/2-BPS conformal line defect. In Chapter 3, we show that the coupling of vector multiplets to the previous solution is capable of removing the singularity and present several examples. In Chapter 4, we construct solutions in D = 5, N = 4 gauged supergravity dual to 1/2-BPS surface operators in N = 2 superconformal field theories.