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Published August 16, 2022 | Submitted
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Near-Horizon Quantum Dynamics of 4-d Einstein Gravity from 2-d JT Gravity

Abstract

We study quantum fluctuations in the lightcone metric of the 4-d Einstein-Hilbert action via dimensional reduction to Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity. In particular, we show that, in Einstein gravity, the causal development of a region in flat Minkowski spacetime, near a horizon defined by light sheets, can be described by an effective two-dimensional dilaton theory. This enables us to make use of known solutions of the JT action, where the spacetime position of a horizon has quantum uncertainty due to metric fluctuations. This quantum uncertainty can be then directly related to the original 4-d light cone coordinates, allowing us to compute the uncertainty in the time of a photon to travel from tip-to-tip of a causal diamond in flat 4-d Minkowski space. We find that both Planck and infrared scales (with the latter set by the size of the causal diamond) enter the uncertainty in photon travel time, such that the quantum fluctuation in the arrival time may be observably large.

Additional Information

We thank Tom Banks, Temple He, Cynthia Keeler, Juan Maldacena, Allic Sivaramakrishnan and Erik Verlinde for discussion on these directions. KZ and VL are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation "Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity" collaboration grant 2021-2817, and by a Simons Investigator award. The work of SG and KZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632.

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023