We systematically develop the procedure of holographic renormalization for RG flows dual to asymptotically Ads domain walls. All divergences of the on-shell bulk action can be cancelled by adding covariant local boundary counterterms determined by the near-boundary behavior of bulk fields. This procedure defines a renormalized action from which correlation functions are obtained by functional differentiation. The correlators are finite and well behaved at coincident points. Ward identities, corrected for anomalies, are satisfied. The correlators depend on parts of the solution of the bulk field equations which are not determined by near-boundary analysis. In principle a full nonlinear solution is required, but one can solve linearized fluctuation equations to define a bulk-to-boundary propagator from which 2-point correlation functions are easily obtained. We carry out the procedure explicitly for two known RG flows obtained from the maximal gauged D = 5 supergravity theory, obtaining new results on correlators of vector currents and related scalar operators and giving further details on a recent analysis of the stress tensor sector. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

We apply the formalism of holographic renormalization to domain wall solutions of 5-dimensional supergravity which are dual to deformed conformal field theories in 4 dimensions. We carefully compute one-and two-point functions of the energy-momentum tensor and the scalar operator mixing with it in two specific holographic flows, resolving previous difficulties with these correlation functions. As expected, two-point functions have a 0-mass dilaton pole for the Coulomb branch flow in which conformal symmetry is broken spontaneously but not for the flow dual to a mass deformation in which it is broken explicitly. A previous puzzle of the energy scale in the Coulomb branch flow is explained. 1 M.Bianchi@damtp.cam.ac.uk, on leave from

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Starting from the type IIB string on the Z orbifold, we construct some chiral open-string vacua with N = 1 supersymmetry in four dimensions, The Chan-Paton group depends on the (quantized) NS-NS antisymmetric tenser. The largest choice, SO(8) x SU(12) x U(1), has an anomalous U(1) factor whose gauge boson acquires a mass of the order of the string scale. The corresponding open-string spectrum comprises only Neumann strings and includes three families of chiral multiplets in the (8, 12*) + (1, 66) representation. A comparison is drawn with a heterotic vacuum with non-standard embedding, and some properties of the low-energy effective field theory are discussed