By Diego A. Carranza and Juan A. Valiente Kroon
Maldacena’s AdS-CFT correspondence has brought the study of properties of anti de Sitter-like spacetimes (AdS spacetimes for short) to the centre of attention of a wide community of researchers. This class of spacetimes is characterised by a time-like conformal boundary similar to that of the anti-de Sitter spacetime. Maldacena’s correspondence relates AdS spacetimes to dual conformal field theories defined on the boundary of the spacetime. In particular, it allows to obtain information otherwise not easily accessible about the conformal field theories through the numerical computation of the dual spacetime. Thus, numerical simulations of these spacetimes have received a substantial amount of attention in recent years. The existence of the time-like conformal boundary in these spacetimes also has implications of interest to mathematicians studying general properties of solutions to the Einstein equations. AdS spacetimes are examples of non-globally hyperbolic solutions to the Einstein field equations. Accordingly, if one wants to formulate a well-posed initial value problem for an AdS spacetime, in addition to the initial data, it is necessary to provide some information on the boundary. The prescription of boundary data is linked to the question of stability of this kind of solutions to the Einstein equations as, during the last years, numerical evidence has showed that under certain boundary conditions the anti-de Sitter spacetime is unstable under non-linear perturbations.
CQG+ 
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