Schedule Aug 13, 2020
Free Energy from Replica Wormholes
Sebastian Fischetti, McGill
Cite as: doi:10.26081/K68P54

Recent developments on the black hole information problem have revealed that a unitary Page curve can be recovered from the contributions of wormholes to the Euclidean gravitational path integral. The inclusion of such wormholes leads to an interpretation of the path integral as some kind of ensemble average. In this talk, I'll discuss how the presence of these wormholes can make a contribution to the free energy (more generally, the generating functional) of a gravitational theory, which can be computed from the path integral via a replica trick distinct from the more familiar one used to compute von Neumann entropies. Focusing on the case of JT gravity, I'll sketch how this replica trick works, and discuss difficulties with the required analytic continuation. These difficulties parallel some qualitative features of spin glasses including replica symmetry breaking, and I'll discuss what light these parallels might shed on the gravitational picture.


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