skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Award ID contains: 2207659

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. A<sc>bstract</sc> We study classical wormhole solutions in 3D gravity with end-of-the-world (EOW) branes, conical defects, kinks, and punctures. These solutions compute statistical averages of an ensemble of boundary conformal field theories (BCFTs) related to universal asymptotics of OPE data extracted from the 2D conformal bootstrap. Conical defects connect BCFT bulk operators; branes join BCFT boundary intervals with identical boundary conditions; kinks (1D defects along branes) link BCFT boundary operators; and punctures (0D defects) are endpoints where conical defects terminate on branes. We provide evidence for a correspondence between the gravity theory and the ensemble. In particular, the agreement of theg-function dependence results from an underlying topological aspect of the on-shell EOW brane action, from which a BCFT analog of the Schlenker-Witten theorem also follows. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 19, 2026
  2. Abstract Analytic continuation from (3, 1) signature Minkowski to (2, 2) signature Klein space has emerged as a useful tool for the understanding of scattering amplitudes and flat space holography. Under this continuation, past and future null infinity merge into a single boundary ( J ) which is the product of a null line with a (1, 1) signature torus. The Minkowskian S -matrix continues to a Kleinian S -vector which in turn may be represented by a Poincaré-invariant vacuum state | C in the Hilbert space built on J . | C contains all information about S in a novel, repackaged form. We give an explicit construction of | C in a Lorentz/conformal basis for a free massless scalar. J separates into two halves J ± which are the asymptotic null boundaries of the regions timelike and spacelike separated from the origin. | C is shown to be a maximally entangled state in the product of the J ± Hilbert spaces. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 17, 2026
  3. A<sc>bstract</sc> Symmetry algebras deriving from towers of soft theorems can be deformed by a short list of higher-dimension Wilsonian corrections to the effective action. We study the simplest of these deformations in gauge theory arising from a massless complex scalar coupled toF2. The soft gauge symmetry ‘s-algebra’, compactly realized as a higher-spin current algebra acting on the celestial sphere, is deformed and enlarged to an associative algebra containing soft scalar generators. This deformed soft algebra is found to be non-abelian even in abelian gauge theory. A two-parameter family of central extensions of thes-subalgebra are generated by shifting and decoupling the scalar generators. It is shown that these central extensions can also be generated by expanding around a certain non-trivial but Lorentz invariant shockwave type background for the scalar field. 
    more » « less
  4. In the context of anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory , gravitational shockwaves serve as a geometric manifestation of boundary quantum chaos. We study this connection in general diffeomorphism-invariant theories involving an arbitrary number of bosonic fields. Specifically, we demonstrate that theories containing spin-2 or higher-spin fields generally admit classical localized shockwave solutions on black hole backgrounds, whereas spin-0 and spin-1 theories do not. As in the gravitational case, these higher-spin shockwaves provide a means to compute the out-of-time-order correlator. Both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity are found to universally agree with predictions from pole skipping. In particular, higher-spin fields lead to a Lyapunov exponent that violates the chaos bound and a butterfly velocity that may exceed the speed of light. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 10, 2026
  5. We construct two-dimensional quantum states associated to four-dimensional linearized rotating self-dual black holes in (2, 2) signature Klein space. The states are comprised of global conformal primaries circulating on the celestial torus, the Kleinian analog of the celestial sphere. By introducing a generalized tower of Goldstone operators we identify the states as coherent exponentiations carrying an infinite tower of w1+∞charges or soft hair. We relate our results to recent approaches to black hole scattering, including a connection to Wilson lines,$$ \mathcal{S} $$ S -matrix results, and celestial holography in curved backgrounds. 
    more » « less
  6. We present a discrete basis of solutions of the massless Klein-Gordon equation in 3 + 1 Minkowski space which transform as 𝔰𝔩(2, ℂ) Lorentz/conformal primaries and descendants, and whose elements all have integer conformal dimension. We show that the basis is complete in the sense that the Wightman function can be expressed as a quadratic sum over the basis elements. 
    more » « less