A symmetry principle for emergent spacetime

TL;DR

This paper proposes higher-form symmetries as a fundamental principle for understanding how spacetime and gravity can emerge from quantum mechanics, linking symmetry breaking to gravitational features.

Contribution

It introduces higher-form symmetries as a novel symmetry principle underlying emergent spacetime and explores their role in gauge-gravity duality.

Findings

Higher-form symmetries describe emergent spacetime phenomena.

Breaking these symmetries relates to gravitational features.

Nonlocal objects like strings and branes are explained via these symmetries.

Abstract

There are many examples where geometry and gravity are concepts that emerge from a theory of quantum mechanics without gravity. This suggests thinking of gravity as an exotic phase of matter. Quantifying this phase in the Landau paradigm requires some sort of symmetry principle or order parameter that captures its appearance. In this essay we propose higher-form symmetries as a symmetry principle underlying emergent spacetime. We explore higher-form symmetries in gauge-gravity duality and explain how their breaking describes features of a gravitational theory. Such symmetries imply the existence of nonlocal objects in the gravitational theory -- in gauge-gravity duality these are the strings and branes of the bulk theory -- giving an alternative way to understand the nonlocality necessary in any ultraviolet completion of gravity.