Determinant and Weyl anomaly of the Dirac operator: a holographic derivation

We present a holographic formula relating functional determinants: the fermion determinant in the one-loop effective action of bulk spinors in an asymptotically locally AdS background and the determinant of the two-point function of the dual operator at the conformal boundary. The formula originates from AdS/CFT heuristics that map a quantum contribution in the bulk partition function to a subleading large-N contribution in the boundary partition function. We use this holographic picture to address questions in spectral theory and conformal geometry. As an instance, we compute the type-A Weyl anomaly and the determinant of the iterated Dirac operator on round spheres, express the latter in terms of Barnes' multiple gamma function and gain insight into a conjecture by Bär and Schopka. (paper)