Alex Maloney, "Gravity from Averaging CFTs"

Tuesday 23 Jun 2020, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

Zoom only (CERN)

Zoom virtual seminar: Click here to enter room

Abstract:

I will explore the idea that certain theories of gravity in Anti-de
Sitter space are dual to an average over an ensemble of quantum
theories, rather than to a specific quantum theory.  I will describe
an average over Narain’s family of two-dimensional conformal field
theories which describe free bosons on a torus, and compute the
partition function using the Siegel-Weil formula.  The result takes
the form of a sum over geometries as one would expect in a theory of
gravity.  But the  gravitational theory looks more like a Chern-Simons
theory than like Einstein gravity.