Contributor info: Prof. Julian Sonner

Alexander Altland, Boris Post, Julian Sonner, Jeremy van der Heijden, Erik Verlinde

SciPost Phys. 15, 064 (2023) · published 16 August 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We present a quantitative and fully non-perturbative description of the ergodic phase of quantum chaos in the setting of two-dimensional gravity. To this end we describe the doubly non-perturbative completion of semiclassical 2D gravity in terms of its associated universe field theory. The guiding principle of our analysis is a flavor-matrix theory (fMT) description of the ergodic phase of holographic gravity, which exhibits $\mathrm{U}(n|n)$ causal symmetry breaking and restoration. JT gravity and its 2D-gravity cousins alone do not realize an action principle with causal symmetry, however we demonstrate that their universe field theory, the Kodaira-Spencer (KS) theory of gravity, does. After directly deriving the fMT from brane-antibrane correlators in KS theory, we show that causal symmetry breaking and restoration can be understood geometrically in terms of different (topological) D-brane vacua. We interpret our results in terms of an open-closed string duality between holomorphic Chern-Simons theory and its closed-string equivalent, the KS theory of gravity. Emphasis will be put on relating these geometric principles to the characteristic spectral correlations of the quantum ergodic phase.

Tarek Anous, Marco Meineri, Pietro Pelliconi, Julian Sonner

SciPost Phys. 13, 075 (2022) · published 30 September 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Large black holes in anti-de Sitter space have positive specific heat and do not evaporate. In order to mimic the behavior of evaporating black holes, one may couple the system to an external bath. In this paper we explore a rich family of such models, namely ones obtained by coupling two holographic CFTs along a shared interface (ICFTs). We focus on the limit where the bulk solution is characterized by a thin brane separating the two individual duals. These systems may be interpreted in a double holographic way, where one integrates out the bath and ends up with a lower-dimensional gravitational braneworld dual to the interface degrees of freedom. Our setup has the advantage that all observables can be defined and calculated by only relying on standard rules of AdS/CFT. We exploit this to establish a number of general results, relying on a detailed analysis of the geodesics in the bulk. Firstly, we prove that the entropy of Hawking radiation in the braneworld is obtained by extremizing the generalized entropy, and moreover that at late times a so-called `island saddle' gives the dominant contribution. We also derive Takayanagi's prescription for calculating entanglement entropies in BCFTs as a limit of our ICFT results.

Alexandre Belin, Jan de Boer, Pranjal Nayak, Julian Sonner

SciPost Phys. 12, 059 (2022) · published 11 February 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We generalize the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis to systems with global symmetries. We present two versions, one with microscopic charge conservation and one with exponentially suppressed violations. They agree for correlation functions of simple operators, but differ in the variance of charged one-point functions at finite temperature. We then apply these ideas to holography and to gravitational low-energy effective theories with a global symmetry. We show that Euclidean wormholes predict a non-zero variance for charged one-point functions, which is incompatible with microscopic charge conservation. This implies that global symmetries in quantum gravity must either be gauged or explicitly broken by non-perturbative effects.

Alexander Altland, Julian Sonner

SciPost Phys. 11, 034 (2021) · published 18 August 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Quantum chaotic systems are often defined via the assertion that their spectral statistics coincides with, or is well approximated by, random matrix theory. In this paper we explain how the universal content of random matrix theory emerges as the consequence of a simple symmetry-breaking principle and its associated Goldstone modes. This allows us to write down an effective-field theory (EFT) description of quantum chaotic systems, which is able to control the level statistics up to an accuracy ${\cal O} \left(e^{-S} \right)$ with $S$ the entropy. We explain how the EFT description emerges from explicit ensembles, using the example of a matrix model with arbitrary invariant potential, but also when and how it applies to individual quantum systems, without reference to an ensemble. Within AdS/CFT this gives a general framework to express correlations between "different universes" and we explicitly demonstrate the bulk realization of the EFT in minimal string theory where the Goldstone modes are bound states of strings stretching between bulk spectral branes. We discuss the construction of the EFT of quantum chaos also in higher dimensional field theories, as applicable for example for higher-dimensional AdS/CFT dual pairs.

Tarek Anous, Julian Sonner

SciPost Phys. 7, 003 (2019) · published 4 July 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We use the monodromy method to compute expectation values of an arbitrary number of light operators in finitely excited ("heavy") eigenstates of holographic 2D CFT. For eigenstates with scaling dimensions above the BTZ threshold, these behave thermally up to small corrections, with an effective temperature determined by the heavy state. Below the threshold we find oscillatory and not decaying behavior. As an application of these results we compute the expectation of the out-of-time order arrangement of four light operators in a heavy eigenstate, i.e. a six-point function. Above the threshold we find maximally scrambling behavior with Lyapunov exponent $2\pi T_{\rm eff}$. Below threshold we find that the eigenstate OTOC shows persistent harmonic oscillations.