Constraints on Symmetries from Holography.

In this Letter we show that a set of old conjectures about symmetries in quantum gravity hold within the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence. These conjectures are that no global symmetries are possible, that internal gauge symmetries must come with dynamical objects that transform in all irreducible representations, and that internal gauge groups must be compact. These conjectures are not obviously true from a bulk perspective, they are nontrivial consequences of the nonperturbative consistency of the correspondence.

Nonrenormalization Theorems without Supersymmetry.

We derive a new class of one-loop nonrenormalization theorems that strongly constrain the running of higher dimension operators in a general four-dimensional quantum field theory. Our logic follows from unitarity: cuts of one-loop amplitudes are products of tree amplitudes, so if the latter vanish then so too will the associated divergences. Finiteness is then ensured by simple selection rules that zero out tree amplitudes for certain helicity configurations.