We extend a 2d topological model of the gravitational path integral to include sums over spin structure, corresponding to Neveu-Schwarz (NS) or Ramond (R) boundary conditions for fermions. The Euclidean path integral vanishes when the number of R boundaries is odd. This path integral corresponds to a correlator of boundary creation operators on a non-trivial baby universe Hilbert space. The non-factorization necessitates a dual interpretation of the bulk path integral in terms of a product of partition functions (associated to NS boundaries) and Witten indices (associated to R boundaries), averaged over an ensemble of theories with varying Hilbert space dimension and different numbers of bosonic and fermionic states. We also consider a model with End-of-the-World (EOW) branes: the dual ensemble then includes a sum over randomly chosen fermionic and bosonic states. We propose two modifications of the bulk path integral which restore an interpretation in a single dual theory: (i) a geometric prescription where we add extra boundaries with a sum over their spin structures, and (ii) an algebraic prescription involving "spacetime D-branes". We extend our ideas to Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, and propose a dual description of a single unitary theory with spin structure in a system with eigenbranes.
It has been shown recently by Saad, Shenker and Stanford that the genus expansion of a certain matrix integral generates partition functions of Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) quantum gravity on Riemann surfaces of arbitrary genus with any fixed number of boundaries. We use an extension of this integral for studying gas of baby universes or wormholes in JT gravity. To investigate the gas nonperturbatively we explore the generating functional of baby universes in the matrix model. The simple particular case when the matrix integral includes the exponential potential is discussed in some detail. We argue…
Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Berkeley（莱因韦伯理论物理研究所，加州大学伯克利分校）；Martin Fisher School of Physics, Brandeis University（马丁·费舍尔物理学院，布兰迪斯大学）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学物理与天文学系）
We reconsider the Coleman's mechanism that solves the Cosmological Constant Problem by the baby universes. We use the Lorentzian path integral and allow each universe has a different effective field theory and a vacuum. By using the probability distribution of coupling constants, it is shown that the cosmological constant of our universe does not necessary become small due to the effects of other universes.
We study a partially fine-grained description of an evaporating black hole by introducing an open baby universe with a boundary. Since the Page's calculation of the entropy of Hawking radiation involves an ensemble average over a class of states, one can formally obtain a fine-grained state by purifying this setup. For AdS black holes with a holographic dual, this purification amounts to introducing an additional boundary (i.e., baby universe) and then connecting it to the original black hole through an Einstein-Rosen bridge. We uncover several details of this setup. As applications, we briefl…
On the basis of a number of Swampland conditions, we argue that the Hilbert space of baby universe states must be one-dimensional in a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This scenario may be interpreted as a type of "Gauss's law for entropy" in quantum gravity, and provides a clean synthesis of the tension between Euclidean wormholes and a standard interpretation of the holographic dictionary, with no need for an ensemble. Our perspective relies crucially on the recently-proposed potential for quantum-mechanical gauge redundancies between states of the universe with different topologies. By…
The behaviour of baby universes has been an important ingredient in understanding and quantifying non-critical string theory or, equivalently, models of two-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity coupled to matter. Within a regularized description based on dynamical triangulations, we amend an earlier conjecture by Jain and Mathur on the scaling behaviour of genus-$g$ surfaces containing particular baby universe `necks', and perform a nontrivial numerical check on our improved conjecture.
We propose a novel construction of a third quantised baby universe Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}_{BU}$ for the quantum gravity path integral. In contrast to the original description of $α$-parameters, both the bulk and boundary microscopic parameters are fixed in our proposal. Wormholes and baby universes appear due to refined observables, of the boundary dual quantum field theories, that crucially involve the space of representations of the gauge group. Irreducible representations, on which the path integral factorises, give rise to field theoretic superselection sectors and replace the $α$ stat…
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Milano - Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学物理系）；INFN, sezione di Milano-Bicocca（意大利国家核物理研究所米兰-比可卡分部）；Institute for Theoretical Physics（理论物理研究所）
Can a late-time cosmological model based on baby universe absorption explain the z-variation of w?
The Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen University（哥本哈根大学尼尔斯·玻尔研究所）；Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics (IMAPP) Radbaud University Nijmegen（奈梅亨拉德堡德大学数学、天体物理与粒子物理研究所）；Dept. of Physics, High Energy Theory Group, Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学大学物理系高能理论组）
We investigate 2D topological gravity theories with matter fields turned on. We compute correlators of boundary creation operators with extra matter insertions. We provide a systematic procedure to determine a set of $α$-states on which the correlation functions of the different boundary operators factorize. Our results suggest that the boundary dual is an ensemble average of theories with different numbers of replicas of a seed matter contribution that is represented by excitations on top of the gravity sector. The construction of the $α$-states and the subsequent computations in the Hilbert …
We formulate the baby universe construction rigorously by giving a primordial role to the algebra of observables of quantum gravity rather than the Hilbert space. Utilizing diffeomorphism invariance, we study baby universe creation and annihilation via change in topology. We then construct the algebra of boundary observables for holographic theories and show that it enhances to contain an 'extra' Abelian tensor factor to describe the bulk in the quantum regime; via the gravitational path integral we realize this extra tensor factor, at the level of the Hilbert space, in the context of the GNS …
We reformulate recent insights into black hole information in a manner emphasizing operationally-defined notions of entropy, Lorentz-signature descriptions, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. With the help of replica wormholes, we find that experiments of asymptotic observers are consistent with black holes as unitary quantum systems, with density of states given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. However, this comes at the cost of superselection sectors associated with the state of baby universes. Spacetimes studied by Polchinski and Strominger in 1994 provide a simple illustration of the as…
We study $\widehat{\text{CGHS}}$ gravity, a variant of the matterless Callan-Giddings-Harvey-Strominger model. We show that it describes a universal sector of the near horizon perturbations of non-extremal black holes in higher dimensions. In many respects this theory can be viewed as a flat space analog of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. The result for the Euclidean path integral implies that $\widehat{\text{CGHS}}$ is dual to a Gaussian ensemble that we describe in detail. The simplicity of this theory allows us to compute exact quantities such as the quenched free energy and provides a useful pl…
Quantum black holes are described by a large number of macroscopically indistinguishable microstates. Correlation functions of fields outside the horizon at long time separation probe this indistinguishability. The simplest of these, the thermal two-point function, oscillates erratically around a nonperturbatively small average "ramp" and "plateau" after an initial period of decay; these non-decaying averaged features are signatures of the discreteness of the black hole spectrum. For a theory described by an ensemble of Hamiltonians, the two-point function follows this averaged behavior. In th…
The euclidean path integral remains, in spite of its familiar problems, an important approach to quantum gravity. One of its most striking and obscure features is the appearance of gravitational instantons or wormholes. These renormalize all terms in the Lagrangian and cause a number of puzzles or even deep inconsistencies, related to the possibility of nucleation of "baby universes". In this review, we revisit the early controversies surrounding these issues as well as some of the more recent discussions of the phenomenological relevance of gravitational instantons. In particular, wormholes a…
String tension fundamentally determines the properties of strings; yet its value is often assigned arbitrarily, creating a fine-tuning problem. We describe a mechanism for dynamically generating string tension in a flat or almost flat spacetime, using the modified measures formalism, which in turn naturally generates a new type of stringy brane-world scenario. Such a scenario allows strings to achieve near infinite tension confining the strings to two very close expanding surfaces, but the infinite tensions also threatens to distort the near-flat embedding spacetime through large back reaction…
A baby universe from a large family: booklet cosmology states and quantum error correction
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所）；Peng Huanwu Center for Fundamental Theory（彭桓武理论研究中心）
The validity of the Coleman mechanism, which automatically tunes the fundamental constants, is examined in two-dimensional and four-dimensional quantum gravity theories. First, we consider two-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity on orientable closed manifolds coupled to conformal matter of central charge $c \leq1$. The proper time Hamiltonian of this system is known to be written as a field theory of noncritical strings, which can also be viewed as a third quantization in two dimensions. By directly counting the number of random surfaces with various topologies, we find that the contribution…
Black hole thermodynamics suggests that, in order to describe the physics of distant observers, one may model a black hole as a standard quantum system with density of states set by the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy $S_\mathrm{BH}$. This idea has long been considered to be in strong tension with Hawking's prediction that radiation from black holes is nearly thermal, and with low-energy gravity more generally. But the past two years have shown that low-energy gravity does offer a self-consistent description of black hole evaporation consistent with the above idea, and which in particular reproduce…
The quantum gravity path integral involves a sum over topologies that invites comparisons to worldsheet string theory and to Feynman diagrams of quantum field theory. However, the latter are naturally associated with the non-abelian algebra of quantum fields, while the former has been argued to define an abelian algebra of superselected observables associated with partition-function-like quantities at an asymptotic boundary. We resolve this apparent tension by pointing out a variety of discrete choices that must be made in constructing a Hilbert space from such path integrals, and arguing that…
We investigate the decay of metastable de Sitter, Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua catalyzed by a black hole and a cloud of strings. We apply the method to the creation of the four dimensional bubble universe in the five dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime recently proposed by Banerjee, Danielsson, Dibitetto, Giri and Schillo. We study the bounce action for the creation and find that the bubble with very small cosmological constant, of order $Λ^{(4)}/M^2_4 \sim 10^{-120}$, is favored by the catalysis by assuming appropriate mass scales of the black hole and the cloud of strings to reproduce…
In the 1980's, work by Coleman and by Giddings and Strominger linked the physics of spacetime wormholes to `baby universes' and an ensemble of theories. We revisit such ideas, using features associated with a negative cosmological constant and asymptotically AdS boundaries to strengthen the results, introduce a change in perspective, and connect with recent replica wormhole discussions of the Page curve. A key new feature is an emphasis on the role of null states. We explore this structure in detail in simple topological models of the bulk that allow us to compute the full spectrum of associat…
We propose a solution of the naturalness problem in the context of the multiverse wavefunction without the anthropic argument. If we include microscopic wormhole configurations in the path integral, the wave function becomes a superposition of universes with various values of the coupling constants such as the cosmological constant, the parameters in the Higgs potential, and so on. We analyze the quantum state of the multiverse, and evaluate the density matrix of one universe. We show that the coupling constants induced by the wormholes are fixed in such a way that the density matrix is maximi…
In this note we employ methods borrowed from spin glass theory to study the phase space structure of fields in an inflating universe. In particular, we compute the overlap distribution of a suitably coarse-grained, massless scalar on a 1+1 dimensional (hence baby) de Sitter background, and find that (after an appropriate shift and rescaling) it is given by a Gumbel distribution. We also calculate the triple overlap distribution of this system, whose characteristic function turns out to be a product of two Gumbel factors.
The dynamics of baby universes which are branched off in pairs from a large universe and whose respective members are entangled to each other has been studied in quantum gravity and string theory. It is shown that the probability measure for such pairs essentially keeps its Planckian form when one of their two members is trapped by a Lorentzian tunnel and travels through it into another large universe, so that the two baby universes of the pairs preserve their mutual entanglement even when they are going to be finally branched in distinct large universes. The conclusion is thus drawn that big …
In this work, we extend a 2d topological gravity model of Marolf and Maxfield to have as its bulk action any open/closed TQFT obeying Atiyah's axioms. The holographic duals of these topological gravity models are ensembles of 1d topological theories with random dimension. Specifically, we find that the TQFT Hilbert space splits into sectors, between which correlators of boundary observables factorize, and that the corresponding sectors of the boundary theory have dimensions independently chosen from different Poisson distributions. As a special case, we study in detail the gravity model built …
