Alpha states demystified: Towards microscopic models of AdS$_2$ holography

TL;DR

This paper explores microscopic models of AdS$_2$ holography through factorizing dilaton gravity theories, revealing non-perturbative equivalences, the role of null states, and proposing a new duality with a quantum mechanical system.

Contribution

It demonstrates how various factorizing theories produce the same spectra, clarifies the role of null states, and introduces a dual quantum mechanics for a deformed JT gravity.

Findings

Different local potentials yield identical spectra.

Null states must be quotiented out for proper Hilbert space.

A dual quantum system with the same spectrum is proposed.

Abstract

We continue our study of factorizing theories of dilaton gravity, characterized by a universal bilocal interaction. All such factorizing theories can be shown to have discrete spectra, distinguished only by their local dilaton potentials. We show how such theories can be used to construct all alpha-states in the Hilbert space of baby universes of ordinary JT gravity. Large classes of these theories with different local potentials are found to be non-perturbatively equivalent and have identical discrete spectra. This is a concrete example of how different bulk descriptions can give rise to the same boundary theory. Such equivalences manifest themselves as null states, which have to be quotiented out in order to construct a proper baby universe Hilbert space. Our results also allow us to revisit the mechanism discussed by Coleman, Giddings, and Strominger, and concretely link ensemble averaging to the appearance or disappearance of spacetime wormholes. We then investigate JT gravity deformed only by the universal bilocal interaction. In this theory, the only terms that do not cancel in a topological expansion are disks, which capture perturbative fluctuations around a two-dimensional black hole saddle. We find that this theory of black holes has an evenly spaced spectrum, instead of a quantum chaotic one. We present a dual quantum mechanical system with exactly the same discrete spectrum, and propose that this is an example of a new holographic duality between a two-dimensional theory of quantum gravity and a conventional quantum mechanics.