Lorentzian Path Integrals and Jackiw-Teitelboim wormholes with imaginary scalars

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain Jackiw-Teitelboim wormholes with imaginary scalars dominate the Lorentzian path integral, highlighting the importance of physics details in wormhole contributions and their relation to complex couplings in the SYK model.

Contribution

It shows that Jackiw-Teitelboim wormholes with imaginary scalars can dominate the path integral, contrasting with Euclidean axion wormholes, and connects to SYK physics at complex couplings.

Findings

Jackiw-Teitelboim wormholes with imaginary scalars dominate the path integral.

Wormhole contributions are sensitive to the details of the physical setup.

Supports the analogy between these wormholes and SYK model physics at complex couplings.

Abstract

The Lorentzian path integral was recently used to argue that standard Euclidean axion wormholes do not dominate computations of connected AdS/CFT partition functions. We now apply similar methods to study the seemingly-analogous Jackiw-Teitelboim wormholes constructed by Garcia-Garcia and Godet using Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity with an imaginary-valued minimally-coupled massless scalar field. However, this time we find that these wormholes do dominate our path integral for the relevant connected partition function. This supports the suggestion by Garcia-Garcia and Godet that contributions from such wormholes parallel the physics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model at complex couplings. The result also illustrates the sensitivity of wormhole contributions to details of the relevant physics.