TASI Lectures on the Higher Spin - CFT duality

Understand

In these lectures we give an overview of the duality between gravitational theories of massless higher spin fields in AdS and large N vector models.

• We first review the original higher spin/vector model duality conjectured by Klebanov and Polyakov, and then discuss its generalizations involving vector models coupled to Chern-Simons gauge fields.
• We proceed to review some aspects of the theory of massless higher spins, starting with the Fronsdal equations for free fields and moving on to the fully non-linear Vasiliev equations in four dimensions.
• We end by reviewing some recent tests of the higher spin/vector model duality at the level of correlation functions and one-loop partition functions.