Wormholes, emergent gauge fields, and the weak gravity conjecture

By D. Harlow. 2015

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractThis paper revisits the question of reconstructing bulk gauge fields as boundary operators in AdS/CFT. In the presence of the wormhole dual to the thermofield double state of two CFTs, the existence of bulk gauge fields is in some tension with the microscopic tensor factorization of the Hilbert space. I explain how this tension can be resolved by splitting the gauge field into charged constituents, and I argue that this leads to a new argument for the “principle of completeness”, which states that the charge lattice of a gauge theory coupled to gravity must be fully populated. I also claim that it leads to a new motivation for (and a clarification of) the “weak gravity conjecture”, which I interpret as a strengthening of this principle. This setup gives a simple example of a situation where describing low-energy bulk physics in CFT language requires knowledge of high-energy bulk physics. This contradicts to some extent the notion of “effective conformal field theory”, but in fact is an expected feature of the resolution of the black hole information problem. An analogous factorization issue exists also for the gravitational field, and I comment on several of its implications for reconstructing black hole interiors and the emergence of spacetime more generally.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f31f4e45016420bdaa0b8b8b5fdf2dda7764fc5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Eran Palti
2. D. Harlow
3. D. Stanford
4. J. Maldacena
5. Zhenbin Yang
6. Gary Shiu
7. Hirosi Ooguri
8. Pablo Soler

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Eran Palti
2. D. Harlow
3. J. Maldacena
4. D. Stanford
5. Zhenbin Yang
6. Gary Shiu
7. Phil Saad
8. Hirosi Ooguri

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. D. Harlow
2. D. Stanford
3. J. Maldacena
4. Zhenbin Yang
5. Eran Palti
6. Phil Saad
7. Hirosi Ooguri
8. D. Jafferis

Citations in the corpus

• A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency (2018, result): “ters can take arbitrary values in quantum gravity theories, and that theories in which these parameters are large still satisfy the WGC for reasons unrelated to our constraints (see also a comment in [48]). Our work is in the same spirit as a number of recent results showing that the original formul”
• Conformal symmetry and its breaking in two dimensional Nearly Anti-de-Sitter space (2016, background): “erstanding of the emergence of the charges Q . These are the symmetries that allow us to move into the interior!. These charges are analogous to the edge modes of the electromagnetic eld discussed in [23, 24], or the \center" in [25], or horizon symmetries in [26] (see also [34])17. 17It was em”
• Local subsystems in gauge theory and gravity (2016, background): “It has recently been suggested that the bulk gravity theory in AdS/CFT must have an ultraviolet completion that does factor in this way [13].”
• The Weak Gravity Conjecture in three dimensions (2016, background): “see e.g. [24,25]). This was made more precise in [26], but the arguments have loopholes and we do not see a clear way to turn them into a formal proof. A promising avenue was opened by [27] (see also [28] and [29]), which studied the WGC in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, where it can be ”
• Non-supersymmetric AdS and the Swampland (2016, background): “The conjecture has also been related to the holographic principle in [13].”
• Observables, gravitational dressing, and obstructions to locality and subsystems (2016, methodology): “[24] suggested that this puzzle could be naturally resolved by introducing charged matter into the theory: such matter would allow the Wilson lines to end.”
• Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture (2016, background): “e on completely general grounds would be welcome. Some hopes for such arguments come from black hole physics and entropy bounds [3, 5], factorization in spacetimes with multiple asymptotic boundaries [9], AdS/CFT [8, 33, 37], the Complexity Equals Action conjecture [62, 63], or Cosmic Censorship [10”
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “ble. We will also unify and extend the results, both in breadth and detail. With these caveats in mind, the emergence proposal can then be stated as follows. The Emergence Proposal (based on ideas in [31,49,74,89,338]) The dynamics (kinetic terms) for all elds are emergent in the infrared by integra”
• The factorization problem in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity (2018, methodology): “iant prescription for where (and also how) they form.1 In this paper we will be primarily interested in a third issue raised by considering gravitational physics in AdS/CFT: the factorization problem [27,28]. This is the observation that the presence of gauge constraints in the bulk poses a potentia”
• The Ryu–Takayanagi Formula from Quantum Error Correction (2016, methodology): “In the electromagnetic case we can have a situation where the gauge field emerges within effective field theory, such as the CPN−1 model considered in [45].”