Conformal field theories dual to quantum gravity with strongly coupled matter

A holographic conformal field theory is dual to semiclassical general relativity in anti–de Sitter space coupled to matter fields. If the conformal field theory (CFT) factorizes in the large-N limit, then all couplings in its dual are suppressed by the Planck scale, making the matter fields weakly interacting. We propose a mechanism to produce CFTs whose dual matter fields couple weakly to gravity, but interact strongly with each other. We achieve this by turning on exactly marginal multitrace deformations, and quantify the effect using conformal perturbation theory.