Gravitational Constrained Instantons and Random Matrix Theory
CMSA EVENTS: CMSA QUANTUM MATTER IN MATH & PHYSICS SEMINAR
When: September 30, 2020
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Where: Virtually
Speaker: Jordan Cotler - Harvard University
We discover a wide range of new nonperturbative effects in quantum gravity, namely moduli spaces of constrained instantons of the Einstein-Hilbert action. We find these instantons in all spacetime dimensions, for AdS and dS. Many can be written in closed form and are quadratically stable. In 3D AdS, where the full gravitational path integral is more tractable, we study constrained instantons corresponding to Euclidean wormholes. We show that they encode the energy level statistics of microstates of BTZ black holes, which precisely agrees with a quantitative prediction from random matrix theory.