Line Defects in Liouville Conformal Field Theory: Localized Cosmological Constants and Decohered Hyperbolic Geometries
Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校雷恩韦伯理论物理研究所与物理系）；Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, New York University（纽约大学宇宙学与粒子物理中心）
Ahmed I. Abdalla, Jeevan Chandra, Yifan Wang
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113 pages including 3 Appendices, 21 figures, and 2 tables
The study of quantum impurities has long been a central and inspiring theme in quantum many-body physics. Localized impurities are modeled by line defects in quantum field theory. We describe a line defect in Liouville CFT realized as a ``localized cosmological constant'': a non-topological line insertion into the Liouville path integral that is tractable at both weak and strong defect coupling. At weak coupling, we analyze the defect perturbatively and characterize it through its correlations with local operators, energy and information transport, the Casimir energies associated with fusion, and corrections to the open string channel spectrum. We also study the effect of a cuspidal deformation of the defect locus on these observables and describe novel monotonicity properties as the cusp angle is varied. These results derived using perturbation theory are more generally applicable to pinning defects constructed from scalar primary operators in compact $2d$ CFTs. At strong coupling, in a semiclassical limit, the defect admits a geometric interpretation in terms of a discontinuity in the extrinsic curvature of the $1d$ defect locus embedded in $2d$ hyperbolic geometries. The observables characterizing the defect in this regime are computed by gluing hyperbolic surfaces across the defect, and are compared with the corresponding weak coupling results. The correlations across the defect, both at weak and strong coupling, can also be realized by an effective ``decohered FZZT interface'' constructed by diagonal gluing of two copies of the fixed-length FZZT boundary state. These line defects also have interesting interpretations in other models, in terms of end-of-the-world branes in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, dust shells in AdS$_3$ gravity, and interfaces with a proliferation of non-abelian Wilson loops in $4d$ $\mathcal{N}=2$ gauge theories.
We investigate the 1/8 BPS geometries with SU(2) x U(1) x SO(4) x R symmetry in IIB supergravity which were classified by Gava et al, (hep-th/0611065). It is desirable to have a complete set of differential equations imposed on the controlling functions such that they are not only necessary but also sufficient to produce supergravity solutions with those symmetries. We work on this issue and find a new differential equation for the controlling functions. For a special case, we exhaust all the remaining constraints and show that they reduce to one Liouville equation. The solutions of this equat…
The instability of Liouville theory coupled to $c>1$ matter fields is shown to persist even when the ``spikes'' which represent highly singular geometries are allowed to interact in a natural way.
These lecture notes review current progress on the class of conformal theories which may be studied by quantizing the conformal Toda dynamics. After summarizing recent developments in undertanding the quantum group structure of the Liouville theory, one recalls how classically, two-dimensional black holes come out from the non-abelian Toda systems, and reviews the geometrical interpretation of the classical $A_n$-Toda theories, just put forward, that relates W-geometries with the external geometries of holomorphic surfaces in complex projective spaces.
The partition function corresponding to the "polytopic" action, a new action for the gravitational interaction which we have proposed recently, is computed in the simplest two-dimensional geometries of genus zero and one. The functional integral over the Liouville field is approximated by an ordinary integral over the constant zero mode. We study the dependence on both the coupling constant and the cosmological constant, and compare with recent scaling results in standard 2D quantum gravity.
The gravitational measure on an arbitrary topological three-manifold is constructed. The nontrivial dependence of the measure on the conformal factor is discussed. We show that only in the case of a compact manifold with boundary the measure acquires a nontrivial dependence on the conformal factor which is given by the Liouville action. A nontrivial Jacobian (the divergent part of it) generates the Einstein-Hilbert action. The Hartle-Hawking wave function of Universe is given in terms of the Liouville action. In the gaussian approximation to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation this result was earlier …
The path integral of four dimensional quantum gravity is restricted to conformally self-dual metrics. It reduces to integrals over the conformal factor and over the moduli space of conformally self--dual metrics and can be studied with the methods of two dimensional quantum gravity in conformal gauge. The conformal anomaly induces an analog of the Liouville action. The proposal of David, Distler and Kawai is generalized to four dimensions. Critical exponents and the analog of the c=1 barrier of two dimensional gravity are derived. Connections with Weyl gravity and four dimensional topological …
The continuation of the Liouville conformal field theory to c<=1 is considered. The viability of an interpretation involving a timelike boson which is the conformal factor for two-dimensional asymptotically de Sitter geometries is examined. The conformal bootstrap leads to a three-point function with a unique analytic factor which is the same as that which appears along with the fusion coefficients in the minimal models. A corresponding non-analytic factor produces a well-defined metric on fields only when the central charge is restricted to those of the topological minimal models, and when th…
This thesis discusses the worldsheet geometries in the (p,q) minimal model coupled to 2D euclidean Quantum Gravity with particular focus on non-compact geometries. We first calculate the FZZT-FZZT cylinder amplitudes for all pairs of Cardy matter states thereby generalizing the result obtained in arXiv:hep-th/0406030 and discuss the decompositions of the cylinder amplitudes in terms of solutions to the homogeneous Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We then show, that the principal ZZ boundary conditions in Liouville theory can be viewed as effective boundary conditions obtained by integrating out the ma…
Using the Chern-Simon formulation of (2+1) gravity, we derive, for the general asymptotic metrics given by the Fefferman-Graham-Lee theorems, the emergence of the Liouville mode associated to the boundary degrees of freedom of (2+1) dimensional anti de Sitter geometries. Holonomies are described through multi-valued gauge and Liouville fields and are found to algebraically couple the fields defined on the disconnected components of spatial infinity. In the case of flat boundary metrics, explicit expressions are obtained for the fields and holonomies. We also show the link between the variation…
The cosmological constant induced by quantum fluctuation of the graviton on a given background is considered as a tool for building a spectrum of different geometries. In particular, we apply the method to the Schwarzschild background with positive and negative mass parameter. In this way, we put on the same level of comparison the related naked singularity (-M) and the positive mass wormhole. We use the Wheeler-De Witt equation as a basic equation to perform such an analysis regarded as a Sturm-Liouville problem . The cosmological constant is considered as the associated eigenvalue. The used …
Elastic stiffness of three-dimensional black holes and wormholes from Liouville line defects
Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, USA（加州大学伯克利分校利恩韦伯理论物理研究所与物理系）；Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom（牛津大学数学研究所）
The search for scale-invariant random geometries is central to the Asymptotic Safety hypothesis for the Euclidean path integral in quantum gravity. In an attempt to uncover new universality classes of scale-invariant random geometries that go beyond surface topology, we explore a generalization of the mating of trees approach introduced by Duplantier, Miller and Sheffield. The latter provides an encoding of Liouville Quantum Gravity on the 2-sphere decorated by a certain random space-filling curve in terms of a two-dimensional correlated Brownian motion, that can be viewed as describing a pair…
We formulate a non-perturbative lattice model of two-dimensional Lorentzian quantum gravity by performing the path integral over geometries with a causal structure. The model can be solved exactly at the discretized level. Its continuum limit coincides with the theory obtained by quantizing 2d continuum gravity in proper-time gauge, but it disagrees with 2d gravity defined via matrix models or Liouville theory. By allowing topology change of the compact spatial slices (i.e. baby universe creation), one obtains agreement with the matrix models and Liouville theory.
We investigate the dynamics of Randall-Sundrum AdS5 braneworlds with 5-dimensional conformal matter fields. In the scenario with a compact fifth dimension the class of conformal fields with weight -4 is associated with exact 5-dimensional warped geometries which are stable under radion field perturbations and describe on the brane the dynamics of inhomogeneous dust, generalized dark radiation and homogeneous polytropic dark energy. We analyse the graviton mode flutuations around this class of background solutions and determine their mass eigenvalues and wavefunctions from a Sturm-Liouville pro…
We propose a new method to define theories of random geometries, using an explicit and simple map between metrics and large hermitian matrices. We outline some of the many possible applications of the formalism. For example, a background-independent measure on the space of metrics can be easily constructed from first principles. Our framework suggests the relevance of a new gravitational effective action and we show that it occurs when coupling the massive scalar field to two-dimensional gravity. This yields new types of quantum gravity models generalizing the standard Liouville case.
In (2+1) space-time dimensions the Einstein theory of gravity has no local degrees of freedom. In fact, in the presence of a negative cosmological term, it is described by a (1+1) dimensional theory living on its boundary: Liouville theory. It is invariant under the action of the two-dimensional conformal group, which, in the gravitational context, corresponds to the asymptotic symmetries of asymptotically AdS geometries. In the flat case, when the cosmological term is turned off, a theory describing gravity at the boundary is absent. In this note we show that, in the Hamiltonian setup, such a…
We discuss how to extract information about the cosmological constant from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, considered as an eigenvalue of a Sturm-Liouville problem in a generic spherically symmetric background. The equation is approximated to one loop with the help of a variational approach with Gaussian trial wave functionals. A canonical decomposition of modes is used to separate transverse-traceless tensors (graviton) from ghosts and scalar. We show that no ghosts appear in the final evaluation of the cosmological constant. A zeta function regularization and a ultra violet cutoff are used to h…
