Renormalisation in maximally symmetric spaces and semiclassical gravity in Anti-de Sitter spacetime

Abstract We obtain semiclassical gravity solutions in the Poincaré fundamental domain of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo> <mml:mn>3</mml:mn> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> -dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime, PAdS 4 , with a (massive or massless) Klein–Gordon field (with possibly non-trivial curvature coupling) with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary. Some results are explicitly and graphically presented for special values of the mass and curvature coupling (e.g. minimal or conformal coupling). In order to achieve this, we study in some generality how to perform the Hadamard renormalisation procedure for non-linear observables in maximally symmetric spacetimes in arbitrary dimensions, with emphasis on the stress-energy tensor. We show that, in this maximally symmetric setting, the Hadamard bi-distribution is invariant under the isometries of the spacetime, and can be seen as a ‘single-argument’ distribution depending only on the geodesic distance, which significantly simplifies the Hadamard recursion relations and renormalisation computations.