Title: 3D Gravity from an Ensemble of Approximate CFTs

Abstract: One of the major insights gained from holographic duality is the relation between the physics of black holes and quantum chaotic systems. This relation is made precise in the duality between two dimensional JT gravity and random matrix theory. In this work, we generalize this to a duality between AdS3 gravity and a random ensemble of approximate CFT’s. The latter is described by a combined tensor and matrix model, describing the OPE coefficients and spectrum of a theory that approximately satisfies the bootstrap constraints. We show that the Feynman diagrams of the random ensemble produce a sum over 3 manifolds that agrees with the partition function of 3d gravity. A crucial element of this dictionary is the Virasoro TQFT, which defines the bulk gravitational path integral via the cutting and sewing relations of topological field theory. Time permitting, we will explain why this TQFT has gravitational edge modes degrees of freedom whose entanglement gives rise to gravitational entropy.

Talk – Slides

Talk – Video