skip to main content

High Energy Theory Informal Seminar

Wednesday, January 6, 2021
1:30pm to 2:30pm
Add to Cal
Online Event
A violation of global symmetries from replica wormholes and the fate of black hole remnants
Luca Iliesiu, Stanford University,

In this talk, I will show that the presence of replica wormholes in the Euclidean path integral of gravity leads to a non-perturbative violation of charge conservation for any global symmetry present in the low-energy description of quantum gravity. Explicitly, we compute the scattering probability between different charged states in several low-dimensional models of quantum gravity and find a non-vanishing answer. This suggests that the set of all charged states is typically over-complete, which has drastic consequences for the fate of black hole remnants that could carry a global symmetry charge. In the holographic context, we argue that the presence of such a symmetry in the effective description of the bulk should appear on the boundary as an emergent global symmetry after ensemble averaging.  

Please email theoryinfo@caltech for Zoom information.