Chronology Protection in String Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates how string theory's mechanisms prevent causality violations in geometries that appear to allow time travel, ensuring consistency with fundamental physical laws.

Contribution

It demonstrates that stringy effects correct causality-violating geometries, preserving causality and unitarity, and links this to the enhancon mechanism in string theory.

Findings

String theory corrections prevent closed timelike curves.

Causality is preserved after geometry corrections.

Chronology protection aligns with unitarity in dual CFT.

Abstract

Many solutions of General Relativity appear to allow the possibility of time travel. This was initially a fascinating discovery, but geometries of this type violate causality, a basic physical law which is believed to be fundamental. Although string theory is a proposed fundamental theory of quantum gravity, geometries with closed timelike curves have resurfaced as solutions to its low energy equations of motion. In this paper, we will study the class of solutions to low energy effective supergravity theories related to the BMPV black hole and the rotating Wave--D1--D5--brane system. Time travel appears to be possible in these geometries. We will attempt to build the causality violating regions and propose that stringy effects prohibit their construction. We will show how the geometry is corrected and that, once corrected, causality is preserved. We will track our chronology protection proposal in the dual conformal field theory. The absence of closed timelike curves in the geometry coincides with the preservation of unitarity in the conformal field theory. The agent of chronology protection for the geometries studied here mirrors the enhancon mechanism, a mechanism string theory employs to resolve a class of naked singularities.