English

Abelian 3D TQFT gravity, ensemble holography and stabilizer states

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-10-01 v1

Abstract

We construct a model of 3D quantum gravity based on abelian topological quantum field theory (TQFT), by defining the gravitational path-integral as a sum over all 3D topologies with genus-gg boundary Σg\Sigma_g. The path-integral of an abelian TQFT T\mathcal T on any single topology with boundary Σg\Sigma_g prepares a stabilizer state. This way, T\mathcal T partitions all these topologies into finitely many equivalence classes, where each topology within a class is associated with the same stabilizer state. The gravitational path-integral can thus be rephrased as a weighted sum over representative topologies, which are further organized into orbits under the mapping class group of Σg\Sigma_g. One orbit is represented by handlebodies, whose average reproduces the ``Poincar\'e series of the vacuum", while additional orbits describe non-handlebody topologies. The resulting quantum gravity state is Sp(2g,Z)Sp(2g,\mathbb Z)-invariant and can be expressed as a weighted average of 2D CFT partition functions on Σg\Sigma_g. This establishes a duality between a weighted sum over bulk topologies and a weighted sum over boundary CFTs. We introduce the ``λ\lambda-matrix", which relates bulk and boundary weights. The λ\lambda-matrix can be fully determined by the set of topological boundary conditions that the TQFT admits, and we present a systematic procedure to construct this set. Using this framework, we evaluate the λ\lambda-matrix and the TQFT gravity state in several tractable examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.26052,
  title  = {Abelian 3D TQFT gravity, ensemble holography and stabilizer states},
  author = {Nikolaos Angelinos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.26052},
  year   = {2025}
}