English

A Tale of Two Saddles

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-09-09 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.09472,
  title  = {A Tale of Two Saddles},
  author = {Venkatesa Chandrasekaran and Netta Engelhardt and Sebastian Fischetti and Sergio Hernández-Cuenca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.09472},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

48 + 26 pages, 26 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:03:38.609Z