English

SYK wormhole formation in real time

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-09-01 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study the real time formation of the ground state of two coupled SYK models. This is a highly entangled state which is close to the thermofield double state and can be viewed as a wormhole. We start from a high temperature state, we let it cool by coupling to a cold bath. We numerically solve for the large N dynamics. Our main result is that the system forms a wormhole by going through a region with negative specific heat, taking time that is independent of N. The dynamics is smooth everywhere and it seems to follow the equilibrium thermodynamic configurations of the microcanonical ensemble. Also we comment on the relation between this coupled SYK model and Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity theory with bulk fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.03276,
  title  = {SYK wormhole formation in real time},
  author = {Juan Maldacena and Alexey Milekhin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.03276},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

v1: 23 pages + appendices, 14 figures. v2: typos fixed, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:38:23.929Z