High Energy Physics Theory

Holographic complexity in the "complexity equals action" approach is reconsidered relacing the requirement of reparameterization invariance of the action with the prescription that the action vanish in any vacuum causal diamond. This implies that vacuum anti-de Sitter space plays the role of the reference state. Moreover, the complexity of an anti-de Sitter-Schwarzschild black hole becomes intrinsically finite and saturates Lloyd's bound after a critical time. It is also argued that several artifacts, such as the unphysical negative-time interval, can be removed by truely considering the bulk dual of the thermofield double state.

We study the origin of the recently proposed effective theory of stress tensor exchanges based on reparametrization modes, that has been used to efficiently compute Virasoro identity blocks at large central charge. We first provide a derivation of the nonlinear Alekseev--Shatashvili action governing these reparametrization modes, and argue that it should be interpreted as the generating functional of stress tensor correlations on manifolds related to the plane by conformal transformations. In addition, we demonstrate that the rules previously prescribed with the reparametrization formalism for computing Virasoro identity blocks naturally emerge when evaluating Feynman diagrams associated with stress tensor exchanges between pairs of external primary operators. We make a few comments on the connection of these results to gravitational theories and holography.

We find a phenomenon in a non-gravitational gauge theory analogous to the replica wormhole in a quantum gravity theory. We consider a reservoir of a scalar field coupled with a gauge theory contained in a region with a boundary by an axion-like coupling. When the replica trick is used to compute the entanglement entropy for a subregion in the reservoir, a tuple of instantons distributed across the replica sheets gives a non-perturbative contribution. As an explicit and solvable example, we consider a discrete scalar field coupled to a 2d pure gauge theory and observe how the replica instantons reproduce the entropy directly calculated from the reduced density matrix. In addition, we notice that the entanglement entropy can detect the confinement of a 2d gauge theory.

We show that the low temperature phase of a conjugate pair of uncoupled, quantum chaotic, nonhermitian systems such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model or the Ginibre ensemble of random matrices are dominated by replica symmetry breaking configurations with a nearly flat free energy that terminates in a first order phase transition. In the case of the SYK model, we show explicitly that the spectrum of the effective replica theory has a gap. These features are strikingly similar to those induced by wormholes in the gravity path integral which suggests a close relation between both configurations. For a non-chaotic SYK, the results are qualitatively different: the spectrum is gapless in the low temperature phase and there is an infinite number of second order phase transitions unrelated to the restoration of replica symmetry.

TheSU(N)--invariant matrix model potential is written as a sum of squares with only four frequencies (whose multiplicities and simpleN--dependence are calculated).

In flux compactifications of type IIB string theory with D3 and seven-branes, the negative induced D3 charge localized on seven-branes leads to an apparently pathological profile of the metric sufficiently close to the source. With the volume modulus stabilized in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum this pathological region takes over a significant part of the entire compactification, threatening to spoil the KKLT effective field theory. In this paper we employ the Seiberg-Witten solution of pureSU(N)super Yang-Mills theory to argue that wrapped seven-branes can be thought of as bound states of more microscopic exotic branes. We argue that the low-energy worldvolume dynamics of a stack ofnsuch exotic branes is given by the(A1,An??)Argyres-Douglas theory. Moreover, the splitting of the perturbative (inα??) seven-brane into its constituent branes at the non-perturbative level resolves the apparently pathological region close to the seven-brane and replaces it with a region ofO(1)Einstein frame volume. While this region generically takes up anO(1)fraction of the compactification in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum we argue that a small flux superpotential \textit{dynamically} ensures that the 4d effective field theory of KKLT remains valid nevertheless.

Quantizing any model in which a Lagrange multiplier (LM) field is used to restrict field configurations to those that satisfy the classical equations of motion, leads to at most one-loop radiative corrections. This approach can be used with both the Yang-Mills (YM) and Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action; the resulting theory is both renormalizable and unitary, has a positive energy spectrum and has no negative norm states contributing to physical processes. Although this approach cannot be consistently used with scalar fields alone, scalar fields can be coupled to gauge fields so that loop effects in the gauge sector are restricted to one-loop order in a way that satisfies the usual criterion for a consistent quantum field theory.

We study the O(2N) model at criticality in three dimensions in the double scaling limit of large N and large charge. We show that the large-charge expansion is an asymptotic series, and we use resurgence techniques to study the non-perturbative corrections and to extend the validity of the effective field theory to any value of the charge. We conjecture the general form of the non-perturbative behavior of the conformal dimensions for any value of N and find very good agreement with previous lattice data.

We study the retarded field sourced by a uniformly accelerated particle in a non-local scalar field theory. While the presence of non-locality regularizes the field at the location of the source, we also show that Lorentz-invariant non-local field theories are particularly sensitive to the somewhat unphysical assumption of uniform acceleration, leading to logarithmic divergences on the acceleration horizon. Analytic properties of the non-local retarded Green function indicate that the divergences can be removed by placing appropriate sources on the acceleration horizon in the asymptotic past.

Self-gravitating kink solutions of a two-dimensional dilaton gravity are revisited in this work. Analytical kink solutions are derived from a concise superpotential formalism of the dynamical equations. A general analysis on the linear stability is conducted for an arbitrary static solution of the model. After gauge fixing, a Schrödinger-like equation with factorizable Hamiltonian operator is obtained, which ensures the linear stability of the solution.