Strings on AdS Wormholes and Nonsingular Black Holes

Abstract

Certain AdS black holes in the STU model can be conformally scaled to wormhole and black hole solutions of an f(R) type theory which have two asymptotically AdS regions and are completely free of curvature singularities. While there is a delta-function source for the dilaton, classical string probes are not sensitive to this singularity. If the AdS/CFT correspondence can be applied in this context, then the wormhole background describes a phase in which two copies of a conformal field theory interact with each other, whereas the nonsingular black hole describes entangled states. By studying the behavior of open strings on these backgrounds, we extract a number of features of the quarks and anti-quarks that live in the field theories. In the interacting phase, we find that there is a maximum speed with which the quarks can move without losing energy, beyond which energy is transferred from a quark in one field theory to a quark in the other. We also compute the rate at which moving quarks within entangled states lose energy to the two surrounding plasmas. While a quark-antiquark pair within a single field theory exhibits Coulomb interaction for small separation, a quark in one field theory exhibits spring-like confinement with an anti-quark in the other field theory. For the entangled states, we study how the quark-antiquark screening length depends on temperature and chemical potential. In the interacting phase of the two field theories, a quadruplet made up of one quark-antiquark pair in each field theory can undergo transitions involving how the quarks and antiquarks are paired in terms of the screening.