A holographic reduction of Minkowski space-time

Minkowski space can be sliced, outside the light-cone, in terms of Euclidean anti-de Sitter and Lorentzian de Sitter slices. In this paper we investigate what happens when we apply holography to each slice separately. This yields a dual description living on two spheres, which can be interpreted as the boundary of the light-cone. The infinite number of slices gives rise to a continuum family of operators on the two spheres for each separate bulk field. For a free field we explain how the Green's function and (trivial) S-matrix in Minkowski space can be reconstructed in terms of two-point functions of some putative conformal field theory on the two spheres. Based on this we propose a Minkowski/CFT correspondence which can also be applied to interacting fields. We comment on the interpretation of the conformal symmetry of the CFT, and on generalizations to curved space. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.