English

Wormholes without averaging

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-04-01 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

After averaging over fermion couplings, SYK has a collective field description that sometimes has "wormhole" solutions. We study the fate of these wormholes when the couplings are fixed. Working mainly in a simple model, we find that the wormhole saddles persist, but that new saddles also appear elsewhere in the integration space -- "half-wormholes." The wormhole contributions depend only weakly on the specific choice of couplings, while the half-wormhole contributions are strongly sensitive. The half-wormholes are crucial for factorization of decoupled systems with fixed couplings, but they vanish after averaging, leaving the non-factorizing wormhole behind.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.16754,
  title  = {Wormholes without averaging},
  author = {Phil Saad and Stephen H. Shenker and Douglas Stanford and Shunyu Yao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16754},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

34 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:42:59.819Z