On Effective Actions from Holography

Abstract: Inspired by holographic Wilsonian renormalization, we propose a novel perspective on the low-energy effective actions of confining gauge theories with gravity duals. By identifying the IR-boundary value of a certain bulk field as overlapping with the lightest mode of the field theory, we derive its on-shell effective action by integrating over the rest of the geometry. We illustrate the details of this formalism by computing chiral Lagrangian coefficients in a simple AdS/QCD toy model, finding agreement with previous results. At higher orders we obtain new results in that model, including a closed form for the four-pion scattering amplitude to all orders in momentum. Finally, we reformulate our method in terms of bulk Feynman diagrams.