Marginal deformations and the Higgs phenomenon in higher spin AdS_3 holography

Abstract: Recently, a 2d coset model with N=3 superconformal symmetry was proposed to be holographic dual to a higher spin supergravity on AdS_3 and the relation to superstring theory was discussed. However, away from the tensionless limit, there is no higher spin symmetry and the higher spin states are massive. In this paper, we examine the deformations of the coset model which preserve N=3 superconformal symmetry, but break generic higher spin symmetry. We focus on double-trace type deformations which are dual to changes of boundary conditions for the bulk matter fields. In the bulk theory, the symmetry breaking will generate mass for the higher spin fields. As a concrete example, we compute the Higgs mass of a spin 2 field both from the bulk and the boundary theory.