Finite N and the failure of bulk locality: Black holes in AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite entropy black holes in AdS/CFT challenge bulk locality, showing that correlation functions near the horizon deviate from semiclassical predictions and require non-local modifications, revealing fundamental limits of locality in quantum gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a prescription to modify bulk operators in black hole backgrounds, allowing for horizon interior mimicry at the cost of microcausality violation, highlighting non-locality in quantum gravity.

Findings

Correlation functions near the horizon deviate from semiclassical values for finite entropy black holes.

Operators mimicking the interior of the horizon can be defined with non-local modifications.

Commutators at spacelike separation are exponentially suppressed by entropy, ~ exp(-S/2).

Abstract

We consider bulk quantum fields in AdS/CFT in the background of an eternal black hole. We show that for black holes with finite entropy, correlation functions of semiclassical bulk operators close to the horizon deviate from their semiclassical value and are ill-defined inside the horizon. This is due to the large-time behavior of correlators in a unitary CFT, and means the region near and inside the horizon receives corrections. We give a prescription for modifying the definition of a bulk field in a black hole background, such that one can still define operators that mimic the inside of the horizon, but at the price of violating microcausality. For supergravity fields we find that commutators at spacelike separation generically ~ exp(-S/2). Similar results hold for stable black holes that form in collapse. The general lesson may be that a small amount of non-locality, even over arbitrarily large spacelike distances, is an essential aspect of non-perturbative quantum gravity.