Duality and Axion Wormholes

TL;DR

This paper discusses the properties and duality of axion wormholes in four-dimensional Euclidean gravity, emphasizing the non-semiclassical nature of the scalar dual description due to flux sum resummation.

Contribution

It clarifies the duality between two-form gauge fields and scalars in axion wormholes, highlighting the non-semiclassical scalar description caused by flux sum resummation.

Findings

The axion wormhole has a semiclassical two-form gauge field description.

The scalar dual description involves Poisson resummation of fluxes.

Effective action can be computed consistently in both descriptions.

Abstract

The prototype of a Euclidean wormhole solution of Einstein gravity coupled to matter is the axion wormhole in four spacetime dimensions. In this primarily expository article, we spell out some details about this construction. The axion wormhole has a semiclassical description, found in the original paper [1], in which the matter system is a two-form gauge field B with three-form field strength H=dB. The two-form is dual to a massless scalar, but the wormhole does not have a semiclassical description in terms of the scalar. There is no contradiction here as the duality between the two-form and the scalar is not a simple transformation of classical fields but involves, in Euclidean signature, a Poisson resummation of the sum over fluxes. Because of the need for this Poisson resummation, the scalar field cannot be treated semiclassically in the wormhole throat. Nonetheless, it is straightforward to compute the effective action derived from the wormhole in the scalar (or two-form) language, recovering standard claims.