Wormhole effective interactions in anti-de Sitter spacetime

TL;DR

This paper investigates how asymptotically anti-de Sitter wormholes influence low-energy field theories, analyzing different matter contents and their associated quantum states, revealing the role of vacuum choices and particle interpretations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of wormhole effects in AdS spacetime for various matter fields, highlighting the relation between vacuum choices and wormhole state basis, especially for conformal matter.

Findings

Conformal matter allows interpretation of wormhole states as particle-containing states.

Vacuum choice influences the basis of wormhole states and their particle interpretation.

Gravitons cannot be described in terms of particle content due to non-conformal coupling.

Abstract

The effects of asymptotically anti-de Sitter wormholes in low-energy field theory are calculated in full detail for three different matter contents: a conformal scalar field, an electromagnetic field and gravitons. There exists a close relation between the choice of vacuum for the matter fields and the selection of a basis of the Hilbert space of anti-de Sitter wormholes. In the presence of conformal matter (i.e., conformal scalar or electromagnetic fields), this relation allows us to interpret the elements of these bases as wormhole states containing a given number of particles. This interpretation is subject to the same kind of ambiguity in the definition of particle as that arising from quantum field theory in curved spacetime. In the case of gravitons, owing to the non-conformal coupling, it is not possible to describe wormhole states in terms of their particle content.