Topological Ward identity and anti-de Sitter space/CFT correspondence

The dual relationship between the supergravity in the anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and the superconformal field theory is discussed in the simplest form. We show that a topological Ward identity holds in the three dimensional Chern-Simons gravity. In this simple case the proposed dual relationship can be understood as the topological Ward identity. Extensions to the supersymmetric theories and higher dimensional ones are also briefly discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.