Holographic description of 4d Maxwell theories and their code-based ensembles

Abstract

We formulate a precise holographic duality between an ensemble of 4d $U(1)^g$ Maxwell theories living on a spin four-manifold $M_4$ and an Abelian BF-type 2-form gauge theory of level $N$, summed over all five-manifolds with boundary $M_4$. The elements of the boundary ensemble are Abelian gauge theories specified by self-dual symplectic codes over $Z_N$, that parameterize topological boundary conditions in the 5d TQFT. Similarly, the equivalence classes of topologies distinguished by the 5d theory are parameterized by orthogonal self-dual codes. Hence the holographic duality can be reformulated in the language of quantum stabilizer codes. This duality is closely related to the holographic relationship between ensembles of Narain conformal field theories in 2d and level-$N$ Abelian Chern-Simons theories in 3d. In both contexts, the duality extends to correlation functions. In the large-$N$ limit, we find that the boundary ensemble average converges to an integral over the moduli space of the gauge couplings and, when finite, is equal to an Eisenstein series of the orthogonal group, a version of the Siegel-Weil formula that appears in the 2d/3d context. As a spinoff, we clarify the holographic relationship between the gauge group of the 4d N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and the boundary conditions of the singleton sector in the bulk.