Renormalized Volume, Polyakov Anomaly and Orbifold Riemann Surfaces

Abstract: In arXiv:2310.17536, two of the authors studied the function $\mathscr{S}{\boldsymbol{m}} = S{\boldsymbol{m}} - \pi \sum_{i=1}^n (m_i - \tfrac{1}{m_i}) \log \mathsf{h}{i}$ for orbifold Riemann surfaces of signature $(g;m_1,...,m{n_e};n_p)$ on the generalized Schottky space $\mathfrak{S}{g,n}(\boldsymbol{m})$. In this paper, we prove the holographic duality between $\mathscr{S}{\boldsymbol{m}}$ and the renormalized hyperbolic volume $V_{\text{ren}}$ of the corresponding Schottky 3-orbifolds with lines of conical singularity that reach the conformal boundary. In case of the classical Liouville action on $\mathfrak{S}{g}$ and $\mathfrak{S}{g,n}(\boldsymbol{\infty})$, the holography principle was proved in arXiv:hep-th/0005106v2 and arXiv:1508.02102, respectively. Our result implies that $V_{\text{ren}}$ acts as K\"ahler potential for a particular combination of the Weil-Petersson and Takhtajan-Zograf metrics that appears in the local index theorem for orbifold Riemann surfaces arXiv:1701.00771. Moreover, we demonstrate that under the conformal transformations, the change of function $\mathscr{S}{\boldsymbol{m}}$ is equivalent to the Polyakov anomaly, which indicates that the function $\mathscr{S}{\boldsymbol{m}}$ is a consistent height function with a unique hyperbolic solution. Consequently, the associated renormalized hyperbolic volume $V_{\text{ren}}$ also admits a Polyakov anomaly formula. The method we used to establish this equivalence may provide an alternative approach to derive the renormalized Polyakov anomaly for Riemann surfaces with punctures (cusps), as described in arXiv:0909.0807.