Semiclassical saddles of three-dimensional gravity via holography

Abstract

We find out the complex geometries corresponding to the semiclassical saddles of three-dimensional quantum gravity by making use of the known results of dual conformal field theory (CFT), which is effectively given by Liouville field theory. We examine both the cases with positive and negative cosmological constants. We determine the set of semiclassical saddles to choose from the homotopy argument in the Chern-Simons formulation combined with CFT results and provide strong supports from the minisuperspace approach to the quantum gravity. For the case of positive cosmological constant, partial results were already obtained in our previous works, and they are consistent with the current ones. For the case of negative cosmological constant, we identify the geometry corresponding a semiclassical saddle with three-dimensional Euclidean anti–de Sitter space dressed with imaginary radius three-dimensional spheres. The geometry is generically unphysical, but the fact itself should not lead to any problems as derived from consistent dual CFT. We thus find an intriguing example, where the gravity path integral is performed over unphysical geometries. Published by the American Physical Society 2024