2016/09/30 by A. Liam Fitzpatrick, Jared Kaplan · 53 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Central charge #Charge (physics) #Conformal field theory #Conformal map #Operator (biology) #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Semiclassical physics #Spectrum (functional analysis) #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep04(2017)072
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2017(4) (Springer Nature) · 38+10 pages, 17 figures; v2: added refs, comments
openalex created_date 2016/10/07 · arxiv created 2016/10/18 · openalex publication_date 2017/04/01 · arxiv updated 2017/05/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Recent work has demonstrated that black hole thermodynamics and information loss/restoration in AdS3/CFT2 can be derived almost entirely from the behavior of the Virasoro conformal blocks at large central charge, with relatively little dependence on the precise details of the CFT spectrum or OPE coefficients. Here, we elaborate on the non-perturbative behavior of Virasoro blocks by classifying all ‘saddles’ that can contribute for arbitrary values of external and internal operator dimensions in the semiclassical large central charge limit. The leading saddles, which determine the naive semiclassical behavior of the Virasoro blocks, all decay exponentially at late times, and at a rate that is independent of internal operator dimensions. Consequently, the semiclassical contribution of a finite number of high-energy states cannot resolve a well-known version of the information loss problem in AdS3. However, we identify two infinite classes of sub-leading saddles, and one of these classes does not decay at late times.