Holography of the BTZ Black Hole, Inside and Out

TL;DR

This paper develops a dual CFT framework for the BTZ black hole, including regions beyond the singularity, and demonstrates how boundary correlators can probe the black hole interior within a consistent quantum gravity setting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dual structure for BTZ black holes incorporating 'whisker' regions and shows how boundary correlators can access the interior physics.

Findings

Boundary correlators in whisker regions are protected and well-defined.

Correlators describe physics inside the horizon but outside the singularity.

The approach provides a non-perturbative CFT perspective on black hole singularities.

Abstract

We propose a 1+1 dimensional CFT dual structure for quantum gravity and matter on the extended 2+1 dimensional BTZ black hole, realized as a quotient of the Poincare patch of AdS$_3$. The quotient spacetime includes regions beyond the singularity, "whiskers", containing timelike and lightlike closed curves, which at first sight seem unphysical. The spacetime includes the usual AdS-asymptotic boundaries outside the horizons as well as boundary components inside the whiskers. We show that local boundary correlators with some endpoints in the whisker regions: (i) are a protected class of amplitudes, dominated by effective field theory even when the associated Witten diagrams appear to traverse the singularity, (ii) describe well-defined diffeomorphism-invariant quantum gravity amplitudes in BTZ, (iii) sharply probe some of the physics inside the horizon but outside the singularity, and (iv) are equivalent to correlators of specific non-local CFT operators in the standard thermofield entangled state of two CFTs. In this sense, the whisker regions can be considered as purely auxiliary spacetimes in which these useful non-local CFT correlators can be rendered as local boundary correlators, and their diagnostic value more readily understood. Our results follow by first performing a novel reanalysis of the Rindler view of standard AdS/CFT duality on the Poincare patch of AdS, followed by exploiting the simple quotient structure of BTZ which turns the Rindler horizon into the BTZ black hole horizon. While most of our checks are within gravitational effective field theory, we arrive at a fully non-perturbative CFT proposal to probe the UV-sensitive approach to the singularity.