The AdS/CFT correspondence and topological censorship

Abstract In this Letter we consider results on topological censorship, previously obtained by the authors in Phys. Rev. D 60 (1999) 104039, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. These, and further, results are used to examine the relationship of the topology of an asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetime (of arbitrary dimension) to that of its conformal boundary-at-infinity (in the sense of Penrose). We also discuss the connection of these results to results in the Euclidean setting of a similar flavor obtained by Witten and Yau in Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 3 (1999).