We consider string probes in a traversable wormhole geometry that connects two locally AdS$_5$ asymptotic regions. Holographically, this describes two interacting copies of a 4-dimensional gauge theory. We consider string configurations whose endpoints are located either in the same boundary or in the two different boundaries of the wormhole. A string with both endpoints in the same boundary is dual to a quark-antiquark pair charged under the same gauge field, while a string extending through the wormhole describes a pair of colored particles charged under two different gauge fields. When one considers a quark-antiquark pair in each boundary, the system undergoes a phase transition: While for small separation each pair of charges exhibits Coulomb interaction, for large separation the charges in different field theories pair up. This behavior had previously been observed in other geometric realizations such as locally AdS$_5$ wormhole solutions with hyperbolic throats. The geometries we consider here, in contrast, are stable thin-shell wormholes with flat codimension-one hypersurfaces at fixed radial coordinate. They appear as electrovacuum solutions of higher-curvature gravity theories coupled to Abelian gauge fields. The presence of the thin-shells produces a refraction of the string configurations in the bulk, leading to the presence of cusps in the phase space diagram. We discuss these and other features of the phase diagram, including the analogies and difference with other wormhole solutions considered in related contexts.
We find regular axionic Euclidean wormhole solutions in Type IIB string theory compactified on $\text{AdS}_5\times \text{S}^5/\mathbb{Z}_k$. AdS/CFT enables a precise derivation of the axion content of the Euclidean theory, placing the string theory embedding of the wormholes on firm footing. This further sharpens the paradox posed by these solutions.
We study small fluctuations of the stringy wormhole solutions of graviton-dilaton-axion system in arbitrary dimensions. We show under O($d$)-symmetric harmonic perturbation that the Euclidean wormhole solutions are unstable in flat space irrespective of dimensions and in anti de Sitter space of $d=3$.
We analyze the amount of information that can be sent through the traversable wormholes of Gao, Jafferis, and Wall. Although we find that the wormhole is open for a proper time shorter than the Planck time, the transmission of a signal through the wormhole can sometimes remain within the semiclassical regime. For black holes with horizons of order the AdS radius, information cannot be reliably sent through the wormhole. However, black holes with horizon radius much larger than the AdS radius do allow for the transmission of a number of quanta of order the horizon area in AdS units. More inform…
In this work we explore the effect of rotation in the size of a traversable wormhole obtained via a double trace boundary deformation. We find that at fixed temperature the size of the wormhole increases with the angular momentum $J/M\ell$. The amount of information that can be sent through the wormhole increases as well. However, for the type of interaction considered, the wormhole closes as the temperature approaches the extremal limit. We also briefly consider the scenario where the boundary coupling is not spatially homogeneous and show how this is reflected in the wormhole opening.
We construct a few Euclidean supergravity solutions with multiple boundaries. We consider examples where the corresponding boundary field theory is well defined on each boundary. We point out that these configurations are puzzling from the AdS/CFT point of view. A proper understanding of the AdS/CFT dictionary for these cases might yield some information about the physics of closed universes.
We obtain a large class of smooth Lorentzian p-brane wormholes in supergravities in various dimensions. They connect two asymptotically flat spacetimes. In cases where there is no dilaton involved in the solution, the wormhole can connect an AdS_n\times S^m in one asymptotic region to a flat spacetime in the other. We obtain explicit examples for (n,m)=(4,7), (7,4), (5,5), (3,3), (3,2). These geometries correspond to field theories with UV conformal fixed points, and they undergo decompactification in the IR region. In the case of AdS_3, we compute the central charge of the corresponding confo…
I present an informal overview of several recent results about Euclidean saddle points sourced by axion fields in quantum gravity (AdS/CFT), such as wormholes, their extremal "D-instanton" limits and their under-extremal singular counterparts. Concerning wormholes we argue they cannot contribute to the path integral because a stability analysis suggests they fragment like other super-extremal objects. For concrete AdS/CFT embeddings the Euclidean saddle point solutions are neatly described by geodesic curves living inside moduli spaces and can typically be solved for using group theory. Our wo…
We study supergravity instantons sourced by axion (and saxion) fields in the Euclidean $AdS_3\times S^3 \times CY_2$ vacua of IIB supergravity. Such instantons are described by geodesic curves on the moduli space; the timelike geodesics can describe Euclidean wormholes, the lightlike geodesics describe (generalisations of) D-instantons and spacelike geodesics are sub-extremal versions thereof. We perform a concrete classification of such geodesics and find that, despite earlier claims, the wormholes fail to be regular. A subclass of the lightlike geodesics is supersymmetric and, up to dualitie…
We explore the construction and stability of asymptotically anti-de Sitter Euclidean wormholes in a variety of models. In simple ad hoc low-energy models, it is not hard to construct two-boundary Euclidean wormholes that dominate over disconnected solutions and which are stable (lacking negative modes) in the usual sense of Euclidean quantum gravity. Indeed, the structure of such solutions turns out to strongly resemble that of the Hawking-Page phase transition for AdS-Schwarzschild black holes, in that for boundary sources above some threshold we find both a `large' and a `small' branch of wo…
We show that toroidal compactification of type II string theory to six dimensions admits axionic euclidean wormhole solutions. These wormholes can be inserted into $AdS_3 \times S^3 \times T^4$ backgrounds, which have a well-defined CFT dual. AdS/CFT duality then suggests that the wormhole solutions cannot be interpreted using $α$ parameters as originally suggested by Coleman.
We consider the behavior of open strings on AdS wormholes in Gauss-Bonnet theory, which are the Gauss-Bonnet gravity duals of a pair of field theories. A string with both endpoints on the same side of the wormhole describes two charges within the same field theory, which exhibit Coulomb interaction for small separation. On the other hand, a string extending through the wormhole describes two charges which live in different field theories, and they exhibit a spring-like confining potential. A transition occurs when there is a pair of charges present within each field theory: for small separatio…
We construct an eternal traversable wormhole connecting two asymptotically $\text{AdS}_4$ regions. The wormhole is dual to the ground state of a system of two identical holographic CFT's coupled via a single low-dimension operator. The coupling between the two CFT's leads to negative null energy in the bulk, which supports a static traversable wormhole. As the ground state of a simple Hamiltonian, it may be possible to make these wormholes in the lab or on a quantum computer.
We consider the behavior of open strings on AdS wormholes in Gauss-Bonnet theory, which are the Gauss-Bonnet gravity duals of a pair of field theories. A string with both endpoints on the same side of the wormhole describes two charges within the same field theory, which exhibit Coulomb interaction for small separation. On the other hand, a string extending through the wormhole describes two charges which live in different field theories, and they exhibit a spring-like confining potential. A transition occurs when there is a pair of charges present within each field theory: for small separatio…
We investigate the structure of two point functions for the QFT dual to an asymptotically Lorentzian AdS-wormhole. The bulk geometry is a solution of 5-dimensional second order Einstein Gauss Bonnet gravity and causally connects two asymptotically AdS space times. We revisit the GKPW prescription for computing two-point correlation functions for dual QFT operators O in Lorentzian signature and we propose to express the bulk fields in terms of the independent boundary values phi_0^\pm at each of the two asymptotic AdS regions, along the way we exhibit how the ambiguity of normalizable modes in …
We investigate the connection between spacetime wormholes and ensemble averaging in the context of higher spin AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$. Using techniques from modular bootstrap combined with some holographic inputs, we evaluate the partition function of a Euclidean wormhole in AdS$_3$ higher spin gravity. The fixed spin sectors of the dual CFT$_2$ exhibit features that starkly go beyond conventional random matrix ensembles: power-law ramps in the spectral form factor and potentials with a double-well/crest underlying the level statistics.
We attempt to construct eternal traversable wormholes connecting two asymptotically AdS regions by introducing a static coupling between their dual CFTs. We prove that there are no semiclassical traversable wormholes with Poincaré invariance in the boundary directions in higher than two spacetime dimensions. We critically examine the possibility of evading our result by coupling a large number of bulk fields. Static, traversable wormholes with less symmetry may be possible, and could be constructed using the ingredients we develop here.
In general relativity, traversable wormholes are possible provided they do not represent shortcuts in the spacetime. Einstein equations, together with the achronal averaged null energy condition, demand to take longer for an observer to go through the wormhole than through the ambient space. This forbids wormholes connecting two distant regions in the space. The situation is different when higher-curvature corrections are considered. Here, we construct a traversable wormhole solution connecting two asymptotically flat regions, otherwise disconnected. This geometry is an electro-vacuum solution…
In this paper, we study the Lorentzian AdS wormhole solutions constructed in arXiv:0808.2481 [hep-th]. Each of them is a classical solution interpolating between an AdS space and a flat space in type IIB supergravity. We calculate the holographic entanglement entropy to probe this geometry. Our analysis shows that there exits a mass gap in its holographic dual gauge theory and that the entanglement between the two boundaries is rather suppressed than that we naively expect for wormholes. We also examine the holographic conductivity on a probe D-brane in this spacetime.
In recent work we computed the path integral of three-dimensional gravity with negative cosmological constant on spaces which are topologically a torus times an interval. Here we employ a modular bootstrap to show that the amplitude is completely fixed by consistency conditions and a few basic inputs from gravity. This bootstrap is notably for an ensemble of CFTs, rather than for a single instance. We also compare the 3d gravity result with the Narain ensemble. The former is well-approximated at low temperature by a random matrix theory ansatz, and we conjecture that this behavior is generic f…
Based on the work of Gao-Jafferis-Wall and Maldacena-Stanford-Yang, we observe that the time-shifted thermofield states of two entangled CFTs can be made traversable by an appropriate coupling of the two CFTs, or alternatively by the application of a modified quantum teleportation protocol. This provides evidence for the smoothness of the horizon for a large class of entangled states related to the thermofield by time-translations. The smoothness of these states has some relevance for the firewall paradox and the proposal that some observables in quantum gravity may be state-dependent. We noti…
There are two important examples of physical systems which violate the strong energy condition : Universes (like, it would seem, our own) with a positive cosmological constant, and wormholes. We suggest that a positive cosmological constant can be reconciled with string theory by considering wormholes in string backgrounds. This is argued in two directions : first, we show that brane-worlds with positive cosmological constants give rise to bulk singularities which are best resolved by embedding the brane-world in an AdS/CFT wormhole; and second, for the simplest kind of wormhole in an asymptot…
We study four coupled SYK models and nearly AdS$_2$ gravities. In the SYK model side, we construct a model that couples two copies of two coupled SYK models. In nearly AdS$_2$ gravity side, we entangle matter fields in two copies of traversable wormholes. In both cases, the systems show first order phase transitions at zero temperature by changing couplings, which is understood as the exchange of traversable wormhole configurations. In nearly AdS$_2$ gravity cases, by exchanging the role of space and time the wormholes are interpreted as bra-ket wormholes. In Lorentzian signature, these bra-ke…
We find half-wormhole solutions in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity by allowing the geometry to end on a spacetime D-brane with specific boundary conditions. This theory also contains a Euclidean wormhole which leads to a factorization problem. We propose that half-wormholes provide a gravitational picture for how factorization is restored and show that the Euclidean wormhole emerges from averaging over the boundary conditions. The wormhole is known to be dual to a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with random complex couplings. We find that the free energy of the half-wormhole is strikingly similar to t…
We use the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation to study the formation and propagation of bound states in the vicinity of a wormhole in the non-minimal derivative coupling theory of gravity. The wormhole throat connects two Anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We show that when the scalar field lies in high orbital states, the corresponding potential has potential barriers that block the passage of a classical field. We investigate the behaviour of the bound states trapped in the potential wells and provide the flow between the two AdS regions.
Axion Wormholes and the AdS/CFT Factorization Problem
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Laboratoire de Physique de l’École Normale Supérieure, Mines Paris, Inria, CNRS, ENS-PSL, Centre Automatique et Systèmes (CAS), Sorbonne Université, PSL Research University（巴黎高等师范学院物理实验室、巴黎矿业学院、法国国家信息与自动化研究所、法国国家科学研究中心、巴黎文理研究大学、自动与系统中心、索邦大学、巴黎文理研究大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In this work we have derived a class of geometries which describe black holes and wormholes in Randall-Sundrum-type brane models, focusing mainly on asymptotically anti-de Sitter backgrounds. We show that by continuously deforming the usual four dimensional vacuum background, a specific family of solutions is obtained. Maximal extensions of the solutions are presented, and their causal structures are discussed.
Certain AdS black holes in the STU model can be conformally scaled to wormhole and black hole solutions of an f(R) type theory which have two asymptotically AdS regions and are completely free of curvature singularities. While there is a delta-function source for the dilaton, classical string probes are not sensitive to this singularity. If the AdS/CFT correspondence can be applied in this context, then the wormhole background describes a phase in which two copies of a conformal field theory interact with each other, whereas the nonsingular black hole describes entangled states. By studying th…
In general, black-hole perturbations are governed by a discrete spectrum of complex eigen-frequencies (quasi-normal modes). This signals the breakdown of unitarity. In asymptotically AdS spaces, this is puzzling because the corresponding CFT is unitary. To address this issue in three dimensions, we replace the BTZ black hole by a wormhole, following a suggestion by Solodukhin [hep-th/0406130]. We solve the wave equation for a massive scalar field and find an equation for the poles of the propagator. This equation yields a rich spectrum of {\em real} eigen-frequencies. We show that the throat o…
We present several classes of exact solutions in the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system with a cosmological constant. The spacetime has spherical, plane, or hyperbolic symmetry and the higher-dimensional solutions are obtained in a closed form only in the plane symmetric case. Among them, the class-I solution represents an asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter (AdS) dynamical black hole or wormhole. In four and higher dimensions, the generalized Misner-Sharp quasi-local mass blows up at AdS infinity, inferring that the spacetime is only locally AdS. In three dimensions, the scalar field becomes triv…
We study and construct spacetimes, dubbed planar AdS-dS-wormholes, satisfying the null energy condition and having two asymptotically AdS boundaries connected through a (non-traversable) inflating wormhole. As for other wormholes, it is natural to expect dual descriptions in terms of two disconnected CFTs in appropriate entangled states. But for our cases certain expected bulk entangling surfaces used by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) prescription to compute CFT entropy do not exist. In particular, no real codimension-2 extremal surface can run from one end of the wormhole to the other.…
It has long been known that the coarse-grained approximation to the black hole density of states can be computed using classical Euclidean gravity. In this work we argue for another entry in the dictionary between Euclidean gravity and black hole physics, namely that Euclidean wormholes describe a coarse-grained approximation to the energy level statistics of black hole microstates. To do so we use the method of constrained instantons to obtain an integral representation of wormhole amplitudes in Einstein gravity and in full-fledged AdS/CFT. These amplitudes are non-perturbative corrections to…
A fundamental issue in the AdS/CFT correspondence is the wormhole growth paradox. Susskind's conjectured resolution of the paradox was to equate the volume of the wormhole with the circuit complexity of its dual quantum state in the CFT. We study the ramifications of this conjecture from a complexity-theoretic perspective. Specifically we give evidence for the existence of computationally pseudorandom states in the CFT, and argue that wormhole volume is measureable in a non-physical but computational sense, by amalgamating the experiences of multiple observers in the wormhole. In other words t…
We study various aspects of wormholes that are made traversable by an interaction beween the two asymptotic boundaries. We concentrate on the case of nearly-$AdS_2$ gravity and discuss a very simple mechanical picture for the gravitational dynamics. We derive a formula for the two sided correlators that includes the effect of gravitational backreaction, which limits the amount of information we can send through the wormhole. We emphasize that the process can be viewed as a teleportation protocol where the teleportee feels nothing special as he/she goes through the wormhole. We discuss some app…
We study the matter perturbations of a new AdS wormhole in (3+1)-dimensional Einstein-Born-Infeld gravity, called "natural wormhole", which does not require exotic matters. We discuss the stability of the perturbations by numerically computing the quasi-normal modes (QNMs) of a massive scalar field in the wormhole background. We investigate the dependence of quasi-normal frequencies on the mass of scalar field as well as other parameters of the wormhole. It is found that the perturbations are always stable for the wormhole geometry which has the general relativity (GR) limit when the scalar fi…
We consider three-dimensional gravity with negative cosmological constant coupled to a large number of light matter fields dual to relevant operators. By imposing suitable boundary conditions on the matter fields we find eternal traversable wormhole deformations of the BTZ black hole, leading to a three-dimensional analogue of the AdS$_{2}$ eternal traversable wormhole found by Maldacena and Qi. We further identify the field theory of boundary gravitons in this setting, which we then use to compute the spectrum of gravitational fluctuations.
We present the complete family of solutions of 3D gravity (Lambda<0) with two asymptotically AdS exterior regions. The solutions are constructed from data at the two boundaries, which correspond to two independent and arbitrary stress tensors T_R, \bar T_R, and T_L, \bar T_L. The two exteriors are smoothly joined on to an interior region through a regular horizon. We find CFT duals of these geometries which are entangled states of two CFT's. We compute correlators between general operators at the two boundaries and find perfect agreement between CFT and bulk calculations. We calculate and matc…
The holographic duals of Entanglement of Purification through the Entanglement Wedge Cross Section has been a well-discussed topic in the literature recently. More general entanglement measures involving multipartite information and their holographic duals have also been proposed. On the other hand, the recent intriguing program reproducing the Page Curve in Black hole entropy using the notion of islands has also been an obvious issue of attraction. A toy model involving Multiboundary wormholes in AdS$_{3}$ was able to capture many interesting facts about such calculations. In such a toy model…
It has been argued i) that Lorentz-signature solutions with wormholes connecting n asymptotically AdS regions describe bulk quantum states dual to n entangled but non-interacting CFTs and ii) that such bulk wormhole states should be identified with similar entangled but non-interacting bulk systems, each describing quantum geometries with only a single asymptotic region. But if the wormhole is to behave semiclassically, we show that conjecture (ii) cannot hold. Instead, the theory of asymptotically AdS bulk quantum gravity must admit superselection sectors with respect to the CFT observables t…
We show that Euclidean axion wormholes in theories of gravity coupled to a single axion have several independent inhomogeneous perturbations that lower the Euclidean action. Our analysis relies on a judiciously chosen gauge-invariant variable which makes the negative mode structure about axion wormholes transparent. Perturbations lowering the action are concentrated in the neck region and exist for wormholes in flat space and in AdS. Their presence means axion wormholes are not relevant saddle points of the functional integral in quantum gravity. This resolves the paradoxes associated with the…
We describe a class of wormholes that generically become traversable after incorporating gravitational back-reaction from linear quantum fields satisfying appropriate (periodic or anti-periodic) boundary conditions around a non-contractible cycle, but with natural boundary conditions at infinity (i.e., without additional boundary interactions). The class includes both asymptotically flat and asymptotically AdS examples. Simple asymptotically AdS$_3$ or asymptotically AdS$_3 \times S^1$ examples with a single periodic scalar field are then studied in detail. When the examples admit a smooth ext…
In this work we show the existence of asymptotically AdS wormhole geometries where the scalar probe has an equispaced, fully resonant spectrum, as that of a scalar on AdS spacetime, and explore its dynamics when non-linearities are included. The spacetime is a solution of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory with a single maximally symmetric vacuum. Introducing a non-minimal coupling between the scalar probe and the Ricci scalar remarkably leads to a fully resonant spectrum for a scalar field fulfilling reflective boundary conditions at both infinities. Applying perturbative methods, which are particu…
The stability of certain class of asymptotically AdS wormholes in vacuum against scalar field perturbations is analyzed. For a free massive scalar field, the stability of the perturbation is guaranteed provided the squared mass is bounded from below by a negative quantity. Depending on the base manifold of the AdS asymptotics, this lower bound could be more stringent than the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. An exact expression for the spectrum is found analytically. For a scalar field perturbation with a nonminimal coupling, slow fall-off asymptotic behavior is also allowed, provided the squared…
The two-sided BTZ black hole has been instrumental in elucidating several aspects of AdS/CFT. Similarly, multiboundary wormholes provide a useful and rich arena in which probing questions of quantum gravity can be posed and explored. In this work, we find the explicit forms of the Killing vectors needed to construct three-boundary wormholes, with and without rotation, as quotients of AdS$_3$. We ensure that our method captures the full moduli space of such wormholes and elaborate on the generalization of our procedure to more exotic multiboundary spaces, including higher genus.
