arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Gaston Giribet.
We study a class of time-dependent backgrounds in string theory which consist of marginal deformations of minimal strings on AdS$_3$. For such backgrounds, we compute the three-point amplitudes and analyze their properties.
The images of supermassive black holes captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration have allowed us to have access to the physical processes that occur in the vicinity of the event horizons of these objects. This has enabled us to learn more about the state of rotation of black holes, about the formation of relativistic jets in their vicinity, about the magnetic field in the regions close to them, and even about the existence of the photon ring. Furthermore, black hole imaging gives rise to a new way of testing general relativity in the strong field regime. This has initiated a line of research aimed at probing different physical scenarios. While many scenarios have been proposed in the literature that yield distortion effects that would be a priori detectable at the resolution achieved by future EHT observations, the vast majority of those scenarios involve strange objects or exotic matter content. Here, we consider a less heterodox scenario which, involving non-exotic matter, in the sense that it satisfies all energy conditions and is dynamically stable, also leads to a deformation of the black hole shadow. We consider a specific concentration of non-emitting, relativistic matter of zero optical depth forming a bubble around the black hole. Due to gravitational refraction, such a self-interacting -- dark -- matter concentration may produce sub-annular images, i.e. subleading images inside the photon ring. We calculate the ray tracing in the space-time geometry produced by such a matter configuration and obtain the corresponding black hole images. While for concreteness we restrict our analysis to a specific matter distribution, modeling the bubble as a thin-shell, effects qualitatively similar to those described here are expected to occur for more general density profiles.
We study the scalar probe in the near-horizon region of near-extremal five-dimensional black holes and the problem of reattaching the asymptotic region. We consider the example of a Myers-Perry black hole with two independent angular momenta, for which the problem can be solved analytically in terms of the Riemann P-symbols and the confluent Heun special function. By prescribing leaking boundary conditions similar to those considered in the context of Kerr/CFT correspondence, we implement the attachment of the asymptotically flat region, matching the solutions in the near-horizon Myers-Perry geometry with those in the far region. This provides us with a set of explicit expressions for the field response in the background of five-dimensional stationary black holes near extremality, which enables us to highlight qualitative differences with the analogous problem in four dimensions.
The partition function of 3-dimensional quantum gravity has been argued to be 1-loop exact. Here, we verify the vanishing of higher-orders in perturbation theory by explicit computation in the second-order, metric formulation at 3-loops. The number of 1-particle irreducible Feynman diagrams involving both gravitons and ghosts turns out to be 17. Using dimensional regularization, we solve all the diagrams. At 2-loops, we find that all such diagrams vanish separately after regularization. At 3-loops, in contrast, a series of remarkable cancellations between different diagrams takes place, with 9 diagrams beautifully conspiring to yield a vanishing result. Our techniques are suitable to be applied to higher loops as well as to similar computations in higher dimensions.
We study celestial amplitudes in string theory at one-loop. Celestial amplitudes describe scattering processes of boost eigenstates and relate to amplitudes in the more standard basis of momentum eigenstates through a Mellin transform. They are thus sensitive to both the ultraviolet and the infrared, which raises the question of how to appropriately take the field theory limit of string amplitudes in the celestial basis. We address this problem in the context of four-dimensional genus-one scattering processes of gluons in open string theory which reach the two-dimensional celestial sphere at null infinity. We show that the Mellin transform commutes with the adequate limit in the worldsheet moduli space and reproduces the celestial one-loop field theory amplitude expressed in the worldline formalism. The dependence on $α'$ continues to be a simple overall factor in one-loop celestial amplitudes albeit with a power that is shifted by three units with respect to tree-level, thus making manifest that the dimensionless parameter $g_{10}^2/α'^3$ organizes the loop expansion in the celestial basis.
The two-point string amplitude at tree level in flat spacetime reproduces the expected expression for free particles. This has been proven by Erbin, Maldacena and Skliros in [JHEP 07 (2019) 139] by two methods. Here, we provide an alternative proof of this result. Our method consists in considering a timelike Liouville direction as a regularization parameter, which suffices to break time translation invariance and, at the same time, to stabilize the residual conformal symmetry in the worldsheet. This allows taking a limit and restoring Poincare symmetry in a controlled way, thus reproducing the correct expression of the two-point amplitude.
When approaching extremality, rotating black holes tend to expel the magnetic field in which they are immersed. This phenomenon, being reminiscent of the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect in superconductors, is known as the black hole Meissner effect, and here we study it in the backreacting regime and from the near horizon perspective. By resorting to methods recently developed in the literature, which allow to compute conserved charges in the near horizon region, regardless the details of the asymptotia at large distance, we investigate the properties of the black hole horizon when in its Meissner state. We show that, when in such state, the horizon exhibits two sets of supertranslation symmetries as well as a symmetry generated by the local conformal group. The supertranslations are generated by two infinite sets of currents, one of which comes from local dilations of the advanced null coordinate at the horizon, and the other from local gauge transformations that preserve the electromagnetic field configuration at the horizon. We show that the evaluation of the conserved charges associated to these symmetries correctly reproduce the physical charges of the magnetized black holes and their thermodynamics. This represents a concrete application of the techniques developed in [1,2,3] and it extends the results of [4] to arbitrary values of the black hole charges. In addition, we elaborate on the charges computation at the horizon: we show the equivalence between the horizon charges and the evaluation of the corresponding Komar integrals. Besides, we show the validity of the Gauss phenomenon by explicitly relating near horizon charges with fluxes and charges computed by other techniques. All this provides a method to derive the thermodynamics of magnetized horizons in a quite succinct way, including the case of horizons exhibiting the Meissner effect.
In many cases, the near-horizon geometry encodes sufficient information to compute conserved charges of a gravitational solution, including thermodynamic quantities. These charges are Noether charges associated to asymptotic isometries that preserve appropriate boundary conditions at the future horizon. For isolated, compact horizons these charges turn out to be integrable, conserved and finite, and they have been studied in many examples of interest, notably in 3+1 dimensions. In higher dimensions, where the variety of horizon structures is more diverse, it is still possible to apply the same method, although explicit examples have so far been limited to simple topologies. In this paper, we demonstrate that such computations can also be applied to higher-dimensional solutions with event horizons whose spacelike cross sections exhibit non-trivial topology. We provide several explicit examples, with particular focus on the 5-dimensional black ring.
We consider the low-energy effective action of string theory at order $α'$, including $R^2$-corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert gravitational action and non-trivial dilaton coupling. By means of a convenient field redefinition, we manage to express the theory in a frame that enables us to solve its field equations analytically and perturbatively in $α' $ for a static spherically symmetric ansatz in an arbitrary number of dimensions. The set of solutions we obtain is compatible with asymptotically flat geometries exhibiting a regular event horizon at which the dilaton is well-behaved. For the 4-dimensional case, we also derive the stationary black hole configuration at first order in $α'$ and in the slowly rotating approximation. This yields string theory modifications to the Kerr geometry, including terms of the form $a$, $a^2$, $α'$ and $aα'$. In addition, we obtain the first $α'$ correction to the C-metrics, which accommodates accelerating black holes. We work in the string frame and discuss the connection to the Einstein frame, for which rotating black holes have already been obtained in the literature.
WAdS/WCFT correspondence is an interesting realization of non-AdS holography. It relates 3-dimensional Warped-Anti-de Sitter (WAdS$_3$) spaces to a special class of 2-dimensional quantum field theory with chiral scaling symmetry that acts only on right-moving modes. The latter are often called Warped Conformal Field Theories (WCFT$_2$), and their existence makes WAdS/WCFT particularly interesting as a tool to investigate a new type of 2-dimensional conformal structure. Besides, WAdS/WCFT is interesting because it enables to apply holographic techniques to the microstate counting problem of non-AdS, non-supersymmetric black holes. Asymptotically WAdS$_3$ black holes (WBH$_3$) appear as solutions of topologically massive theories, Chern-Simons theories, and many other models. Here, we explore WBH$_3\times Σ_{D-3}$ solutions of $D$-dimensional higher-curvature gravity, with $Σ_{D-3}$ being different internal manifolds, typically given by products of deformations of hyperbolic spaces, although we also consider warped products with time-dependent deformations. These geometries are solutions of the second order higher-curvature theory at special (critical) points of the parameter space, where the theory exhibits a sort of degeneracy. We argue that the dual (W)CFT at those points is actually trivial. In many respects, these critical points of WAdS$_3 \times Σ_{D-3}$ vacua are the squashed/stretched analogs of the AdS$_D$ Chern-Simons point of Lovelock gravity.
We study extremal surfaces in a traversable wormhole geometry that connects two locally AdS$_5$ asymptotic regions. In the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we use these to compute the holographic entanglement entropy for different configurations: First, we consider an extremal surface anchored at the boundary on a spatial $2$-sphere of radius $R$. The other scenario is a slab configuration which extends in two of the boundary spacelike directions while having a finite size $L$ in the third one. We show that in both cases the divergent and the finite pieces of the holographic entanglement entropy give results consistent with the holographic picture and this is used to explore the phase transitions that the dual theory undergoes. The geometries we consider here are stable thin-shell wormholes with flat codimension-one hypersurfaces at fixed radial coordinate. They appear as electrovacuum solutions of higher-curvature gravity theories coupled to Abelian gauge fields. The presence of the thin-shells produces a refraction of the extremal surfaces in the bulk, leading to the presence of cusps in the phase space diagram. Further, the traversable wormhole captures a phase transition for the subsystems made up of a union of disconnected regions in different boundaries. We discuss these and other features of the phase diagram.
Motivated by recent works on the connection between 2D quantum gravity and timelike Liouville theory, we revisit the latter and clarify some aspects of the computation of its partition function: We present a detailed computation of the Liouville partition function on the fluctuating sphere at finite values of the central charge. The results for both the spacelike theory and the timelike theory are given, and their properties analyzed. We discuss the derivation of the partition function from the DOZZ formula, its derivation using the Coulomb gas approach, a semiclassical computation of it using the fixed area saddle point, and, finally, we arrive to an exact expression for the timelike partition function whose expansion can be compared with the 3-loop perturbative calculations reported in the literature. We also discuss the connection to the 2D black hole and other related topics.
We demonstrate that the near horizon symmetries of black holes in Einstein--Yang-Mills (EYM) theory are generated by an infinite-dimensional algebra that contains, in addition to supertranslations and superrotations, a non-Abelian loop algebra. This means that the Virasoro--Kac-Moody structure of EYM in asymptotically flat spacetimes has an exact analog in the near horizon region.
We study static black hole solutions with locally spherical horizons coupled to non-Abelian field in $\mathcal{N}=4$ Chern-Simons AdS$_5$ supergravity. They are governed by three parameters associated to the mass, axial torsion and amplitude of the internal soliton, and two ones to the gravitational hair. They describe geometries that can be a global AdS space, naked singularity or a (non-)extremal black hole. We analyze physical properties of two inequivalent asymptotically AdS solutions when the spatial section at radial infinity is either a 3-sphere or a projective 3-space. An important feature of these 3-parametric solutions is that they possess a topological structure including two $SU(2)$ solitons that wind nontrivially around the black hole horizon, as characterized by the Pontryagin index. In the extremal black hole limit, the solitons' strengths match and a soliton-antisoliton system unwinds. That limit admits both non-BPS and BPS configurations. For the latter, the pure gauge and non-pure gauge solutions preserve $1/2$ and $1/16$ of the original supersymmetries, respectively. In a general case, we compute conserved charges in Hamiltonian formalism, finding many similarities with standard supergravity black holes.
Motivated by recent works in which the FZZ duality plays an important role, we revisit the computation of correlation functions in the sine-Liouville field theory. We present a direct computation of the three-point function, the simplest to the best of our knowledge, and give expressions for the $N$-point functions in terms of integrated Liouville theory correlators. This leads us to discuss the relation to the $H^+_3$ WZW-Liouville correspondence, especially in the case in which spectral flow is taken into account. We explain how these results can be used to study scattering amplitudes of winding string states in AdS$_3$.
We study stationary black holes in the presence of an external strong magnetic field. In the case where the gravitational backreaction of the magnetic field is taken into account, such an scenario is well described by the Ernst-Wild solution to Einstein-Maxwell field equations, representing a charged, stationary black hole immersed in a Melvin magnetic universe. This solution, however, describes a physical situation only in the region close to the black hole. This is due to the following two reasons: Firstly, Melvin spacetime is not asymptotically locally flat; secondly, the non-static Ernst-Wild solution is not even asymptotically Melvin due to the infinite extension of its ergoregion. All this might seem to be an obstruction to address an scenario like this; for instance, it seems to be an obstruction to compute conserved charges as this usually requires a clear notion of asymptotia. Here, we circumvent this obstruction by providing a method to compute the conserved charges of such a black hole by restricting the analysis to the near horizon region. We compute the Wald entropy, the mass, the electric charge, and the angular momentum of stationary black holes in highly magnetized environments from the horizon perspective, finding results in complete agreement with other formalisms.
We consider accelerated black hole horizons with and without defects. These horizons appear in the $C$-metric solution to Einstein equations and in its generalization to the case where external fields are present. These solutions realize a variety of physical processes, from the decay of a cosmic string by a black hole pair nucleation to the creation of a black hole pair by an external electromagnetic field. Here, we show that such geometries exhibit an infinite set of symmetries in their near horizon region, generalizing in this way previous results for smooth isolated horizons. By considering the limit close to both the black hole and the acceleration horizons, we show that a sensible set of asymptotic boundary conditions gets preserved by supertranslation and superrotation transformations. By acting on the geometry with such transformations, we derive the superrotated, supertranslated version of the $C$-metric and compute the associated conserved charges.
It is well known that massive 3D gravity admits solutions that describe Lifshitz black holes as those considered in non-relativistic holography. However, the determination of the mass of such black holes remained unclear as many different results were reported in the literature presenting discrepancies. Here, by using a robust method that permits to tackle the problem in the strong field regime, we determine the correct mass of the Lifshitz black hole of the higher-derivative massive gravity and compare it with other results obtained by different methods. Positivity of the mass spectrum demands an odd normalization of the gravity action. In spite of this fact, the result turns out to be consistent with computations inspired in holography.