Abstract
We determine the spectrum of graviton excitations in the background geometry of the AdS soliton in p+2 dimensions. Via the AdS/CFT correspondence, this corresponds to determining the spectrum of spin-two excitations in the dual effective p-dimensional field theories. For the cases of D3- and M5-branes, these are the spin-two glueballs of QCD3 and QCD4, respectively. For all values ofp, we find an exact degeneracy of the spectra of these tensor states and certain scalar excitations. Our results also extend the perturbative proof of a positive energy conjecture for asymptotically locally AdS spacetimes (originally proposed for p = 3) to an arbitrary number of dimensions.