Wormholes and the Conformal Bootstrap

A wormhole is a geometry which connects two widely separated regions of space-time.  Wormholes are ubiquitous in many theories of gravity, but remain poorly understood.  However, we can study them using the "AdS/CFT correspondence," which relates theories of quantum gravity to conformal field theories (CFTs) in one less dimension.  These CFTs are similar to the gauge theories which describe the fundamental forces of particle physics, as well as to those which describe important statistical and condensed matter systems at criticality.  I will describe a simple setup where we can understand the effects of wormholes precisely, using a set of strongly coupled techniques known as the conformal bootstrap.  We will conclude that Einstein gravity is described by to a “disorder averaged” quantum theory, much like a spin glass or other system with quantum chaos. The upshot is this: in a theory of gravity with wormholes, the coupling constants of nature look like random variables.

Speaker: Alexander Maloney, Syracuse University