Diamonds in the Bulk and Large-$N$ Scaling in AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper investigates the algebraic structure of quantum fields in AdS/CFT, challenging previous claims about bulk field algebras and emphasizing the importance of a double scaling limit for their emergence.

Contribution

It refutes the claim that bulk local field algebras exist at finite UV cutoff and clarifies that such algebras only emerge in a specific double scaled limit as N and the cutoff go to infinity.

Findings

Bulk field algebra emerges only in a double scaled limit.

Finite UV cutoff does not produce a bulk local field algebra.

Distances smaller than the AdS radius are not resolved by bulk field theory.

Abstract

Quantum Field Theory (QFT) introduced us to the notion that a causal diamond in space-time corresponded to a subsystem of a quantum mechanical system defined on the global space-time. Work by Jacobson, Fischler and Susskind, and particularly Bousso suggested that, in the quantum theory of gravity, this subsystem should have a density matrix of finite entropy. These authors formalized older intuitive arguments based on black hole physics. Although mathematically, Type II von Neumann algebras admit finite entropy density matrices, the black hole arguments suggest that the number of physical states in these subsystems is finite. The conjecture that de Sitter (dS) space has a finite number of physical states was first made by Fischler and one of the present authors. Leutheusser and Liu showed that, in the $N = \infty$ limit, causal diamonds with finite area in AdS radius units had Type $III_1$ von Neumann sub-algebras of the full operator algebra. They claimed that this was true for finite values of the UV cutoff, and that the algebra was the algebra of bulk local fields in the diamond. We will argue that the second part of this conjecture is incorrect and that the bulk field algebra emerges only in a double scaled limit, where the boundary UV cutoff is taken to infinity as $N$ is taken to infinity. There is never a bulk field theory description that resolves distances smaller than the AdS radius.