Higher Spins, Holography and Exotic Matter

Abstract: We review a new perspective on higher-spin holography, whereby Vasiliev's 4D higher-spin gravity emerges together with a 3D counterpart, consisting of coloured conformal matter fields coupled to topological conformal higher-spin and colour gauge fields, as two distinct reductions, characterised by dual structure groups, of a common parent model. The latter is given by a non-commutative AKSZ sigma model consisting on-shell of a flat superconnection valued in a fractional-spin extension of Fradkin-Vasiliev's higher-spin algebra. In particular, we highlight an intermediate 4D reduction, referred to fractional-spin gravity, consisting of exotic matter, in the form of coloured singletons, coupled to higher-spin and colour gauge fields.