String Theory Journal Club

Recent findings involving Euclidean and replica wormholes have shown that the path integral of semiclassical gravity in AdS provides a "coarse-grained" description of its holographic CFT. In this seminar, I will discuss a statistical interpretation of these results, exploring various notions of coarse-graining and state-averaging within a unified framework. I will establish a probability distribution on the space of density matrices that is maximally ignorant about the UV but can still reproduce low-energy observables. This approach is similar to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and can be described with a simple state-averaging ansatz. Finally, I will demonstrate how this ansatz reproduces several wormhole amplitudes in three and higher dimensions. The ideas presented in this seminar are based on upcoming work with Jan de Boer, Boris Post, and Martin Sasieta.