Why Emergence of Gravity in Matrix Theories is Entropic
Abstract
Matrix theories exhibit the phenomenon of spacetime emergence in certain regimes of their dynamics. In this work, I posit that the key to this emergence is a hierarchy between two timescales -- very slow modes that an observer measures plus a chaotic cloud of very fast modes; this then leads to a natural operator algebra for measurements for the slow modes and an associated density matrix for the full system. I show that this density matrix implies the same gravitational potential energy that has been identified previously in the literature; furthermore, I show that the corresponding emergent gravitational force is nothing but the entropic force associated with the entropy of the fast modes of the system. I also demonstrate that the posited regime corresponds to distances being super-Planckian in the dual eleven dimensional supergravity.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.21996,
title = {Why Emergence of Gravity in Matrix Theories is Entropic},
author = {Vatche Sahakian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21996},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
7 pages