Null states and time evolution in a toy model of black hole dynamics
May 7, 2024
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Abstract: (Springer)
Spacetime wormholes can provide non-perturbative contributions to the gravitational path integral that make the actual number of states e in a gravitational system much smaller than the number of states predicted by perturbative semiclassical effective field theory. The effects on the physics of the system are naturally profound in contexts in which the perturbative description actively involves N = O(e) of the possible perturbative states; e.g., in late stages of black hole evaporation. Such contexts are typically associated with the existence of non-trivial quantum extremal surfaces. However, by forcing a simple topological gravity model to evolve in time, we find that such effects can also have large impact for N ≪ e (in which case no quantum extremal surfaces can arise). In particular, even for small N, the insertion of generic operators into the path integral can cause the non-perturbative time evolution to differ dramatically from perturbative expectations. On the other hand, this discrepancy is small for the special case where the inserted operators are non-trivial only in a subspace of dimension D ≪ e. We thus study this latter case in detail. We also discuss potential implications for more realistic gravitational systems.Note:
- 30 pages, 11 figures
- AdS-CFT Correspondence
- Black Holes
- Models of Quantum Gravity
- gravitation: model
- gravitation: path integral
- space-time: wormhole
- black hole: evaporation
- gravitation: topological
- nonperturbative
- surface
References(21)
Figures(11)
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