Spin-two glueballs, positive energy theorems and the AdS/CFT correspondence

We determine the spectrum of graviton excitations in the background geometr y of the AdS soliton in p +2 dimensions. Via the AdS/CFT correspondence, th is corresponds to determining the spectrum of spin-two excitations in the d ual effective p-dimensional field theories. For the cases of D3- and M5-bra nes, these are the spin-two glueballs of QCD(3) and QCD(4), respectively. F or all values of p, we find an exact degeneracy of the spectra of these ten sor states and certain scalar excitations. Our results also extend the pert urbative proof of a positive energy conjecture for asymptotically locally A dS spacetimes (originally proposed for p=3) to an arbitrary number of dimen sions.