Simple recipe for holographic Weyl anomaly

Abstract

We propose a recipe — arguably the simplest — to compute the holographic type-B Weyl anomaly for general higher-derivative gravity in asymptotically AdS spacetimes. In 5 and 7 dimensions we identify a suitable basis of curvature invariants that allows to read off easily, without any further computation, the Weyl anomaly coefficients of the dual CFT. We tabulate the contributions from quadratic, cubic and quartic purely algebraic curvature invariants and also from terms involving derivatives of the curvature. We provide few examples, where the anomaly coefficients have been obtained by other means, to illustrate the effectiveness of our prescription.