HEP Theory Journal Club

Statistics of three-dimensional black holes from Liouville line defects

Viraj Meruliya

McGill University

Low energy effective theories of gravity capture statistics of observables in the UV complete theory. In this talk, I will explore an explicit example in higher dimensions involving thin shells of matter that can collapse to form black holes. Specifically, I will describe these solutions in 3D gravity and demonstrate how the behavior of black holes and wormholes can be reproduced from the dual 2D conformal field theory (CFT) using the large-c conformal bootstrap. In the CFT framework, thin shells correspond to line defects. The crossing equations yield a universal formula for the average high-energy matrix elements of a line defect in any compact, unitary 2D CFT with central charge c> 1. I will discuss the connections between three distinct quantities: the statistics of line defects in holographic CFTs, individual matrix elements of a line defect in Liouville CFT, and the on-shell action of black holes and wormholes in 3D gravity. Assuming Gaussian statistics for the line defects, I will also show how a specific class of wormholes can be reproduced by the dual CFT.