Probing Confinement in Anti-de Sitter Space

Anti-de Sitter space acts as an infra-red cutoff for asymptotically free theories, allowing interpolation between a weakly-coupled small-sized regime and a strongly-coupled flat-space regime. I will discuss this interpolation in the context of Yang-Mills theories in AdS from the perspective of boundary conformal theories and its implications for the confinement/deconfinement transition. We find indications that at the transition a singlet scalar operator becomes marginal, destabilizing the deconfined phase existing at a small size and triggering a boundary renormalization group flow to a gapped, confined phase that smoothly connects to flat space. Based on forthcoming work with F. De Cesare, L. Di Pietro, M. Serone.