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Friday, January 15, 2021
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Online Event

High Energy Theory Seminar

New non-perturbative effects in the gravitational path integral
Jordan Cotler, Harvard University,

We discover a wide range of new non-perturbative effects in quantum gravity, namely moduli spaces of constrained saddles of the gravitational path integral.  We find these in all spacetime dimensions, for AdS and dS.  Many can be written in closed form, and some are shown to be quadratically stable.  In the Euclidean AdS setting, these constrained saddles correspond to Euclidean wormholes.  In 3D AdS, where the gravitational path integral is more tractable, we study these Euclidean wormholes and show that they encode the energy level statistics of microstates of BTZ black holes.  Furthermore, these statistics precisely agree with a quantitative prediction from random matrix theory.  We also show that there is an AdS5 Euclidean wormhole with S1 x S3 boundaries which is stable in string theory (or at least, evades various known instability mechanisms), thus providing a sharp factorization paradox for AdS/CFT.

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