Abstract
Holography on cutoff surfaces can appear to be in tension with causality. For example, as argued by Omiya and Wei [1], double holography seemingly allows for superluminal signalling. In this paper we argue that the brane description of double holography should be treated as an effective theory and demonstrate that causality violations due to faster-than-light communication are not visible above the associated cutoff length scale. This suggests that end-of-the-world brane models are consistent with causality and that the apparent superluminal signalling is a UV effect. Moreover, we argue that short distance non-localities generically give rise to apparent faster-than-light propagation of signals in Anti-de Sitter space.
Nonetheless, superluminal signalling indicates that the causal structure on holographic cutoff surfaces needs to be modified. We propose and study three different candidate regions that might replace the domain of dependence in the brane EFT of the Karch-Randall model. These regions are defined by unitarity on the brane, through bulk entanglement wedges and through the nice slice criterion, respectively. In all dimensions, these candidate regions exclude those parts of the domain of dependence which are affected by superluminal signalling. While all three definitions agree in two dimensions, they are different in higher dimensions.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to extend special thanks to Rob Myers for his inputs during the initial stages of this work and for several insightful discussions. The authors also thank Chris Akers, Luis Apolo, Jan de Boer, Soumangsu Chakraborty, Ben Freivogel, Andreas Karch, Adam Levine, Alex May, Takato Mori, Andrew Rolph, Kamran Salehi Varizi, Krishan Saraswat, Erik Verlinde, Masataka Wanatabe, Beni Yoshida for interesting conversations related to this work. During this work DN was partially supported by the Simons Foundation through the “It from Qubit” collaboration and the Heising-Simons Foundation “Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity” collaboration grant 2021-2817. MS thanks the Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, MIT for support through the First Year Graduate Fellowship award and the Perimeter Institute for support through the Perimeter Scholars International Scholarship award. Initial stages of this work was done at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported in part by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities.
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Neuenfeld, D., Srivastava, M. On the causality paradox and the Karch-Randall braneworld as an EFT. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 164 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)164
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)164