Euclidean wormholes in holographic RG flows

TL;DR

This paper constructs Euclidean wormhole solutions in Einstein-dilaton gravity that connect two boundaries with different marginal couplings, analyzing how correlations between dual CFTs decay as the difference in couplings increases.

Contribution

It introduces a family of Euclidean wormholes in AdS that model the decorrelation of boundary CFTs with varying marginal couplings and computes related correlation function variances.

Findings

Wormhole volumes increase with boundary coupling differences.

Correlation functions decay monotonically as boundary couplings differ.

Variance of OPE data decreases with increasing marginal coupling difference.

Abstract

We describe a one-parameter family of Euclidean wormhole solutions with the topology of a compact hyperbolic space times an interval in Einstein gravity minimally coupled to a massless scalar field in AdS$_{d+1}$ commonly referred to as Einstein-dilaton gravity. These solutions are locally described by the same metric and dilaton profile as the single-boundary Janus domain wall solutions in the same theory which are usually studied in the context of holographic RG flows. The wormholes compute the averaged product of partition functions of CFTs on either boundary deformed by different marginal couplings to the scalar operator dual to the dilaton. We observe that the renormalised volumes of these wormholes increase monotonically with the difference in the marginal couplings on the boundary thereby showing that the pair of CFTs on the boundaries get increasingly decorrelated as the difference in the marginal couplings increases. We use the partition functions of the three-dimensional wormhole solutions to determine the variance of the OPE data of local operators between the marginally deformed 2d CFTs and quantify how the variance decays with the difference in marginal couplings. In addition, a family of wormholes sourced by a thin shell of dust determine how the variance of the matrix elements of the dual line defect decays with the difference in marginal couplings. Applying the GKPW dictionary to wormholes, we compute averages of integrated dilaton correlators treating the wormhole amplitude as a functional of the dilaton sources. We observe that the crossed two-point correlators with a dilaton insertion on either boundary decay montonically with the difference in marginal couplings consistent with the observation that the CFTs increasingly decorrelate as the difference in marginal couplings grows.