A tale of two saddles

Abstract We find a new on-shell replica wormhole in a computation of the generating functional of JT gravity coupled to matter. We show that this saddle has lower action than the disconnected one, and that it is stable under restriction to real Lorentzian sectio...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chandrasekaran, Venkatesa, Engelhardt, Netta, Fischetti, Sebastian, Hernández-Cuenca, Sergio
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/146560
Description
Summary:Abstract We find a new on-shell replica wormhole in a computation of the generating functional of JT gravity coupled to matter. We show that this saddle has lower action than the disconnected one, and that it is stable under restriction to real Lorentzian sections, but can be unstable otherwise. The behavior of the classical generating functional thus may be strongly dependent on the signature of allowed perturbations. As part of our analysis, we give an LM-style construction for computing the on-shell action of replicated manifolds even as the number of boundaries approaches zero, including a type of one-step replica symmetry breaking that is necessary to capture the contribution of the new saddle. Our results are robust against quantum corrections; in fact, we find evidence that such corrections may sometimes stabilize this new saddle.