Strings on AdS wormholes and nonsingular black holes

Abstract

Certain AdS black holes in the STU model can be conformally scaled to wormhole and black hole backgrounds which have two asymptotically AdS regions and are completely free of curvature singularities. While there is a delta-function source for the dilaton, classical string probes are not sensitive to this singularity. According to the AdS/CFT correspondence, the dual field theory lives on the union of the disjoint boundaries. For the wormhole background, causal contact exists between the two boundaries and the structure of certain correlation functions is indicative of an interacting phase for which there is a coupling between the degrees of freedom living at each boundary. The nonsingular black hole describes an entangled state in two non-interacting identical conformal field theories. By studying the behavior of open strings on these backgrounds, we extract a number of features of the ‘quarks’ and ‘anti-quarks’ that live in the field theories. In the interacting phase, we find that there is a maximum speed with which the quarks can move without losing energy, beyond which energy is transferred from a quark in one field theory to a quark in the other. We also compute the rate at which moving quarks within entangled states lose energy to the two surrounding plasmas. While a quark–antiquark pair within a single field theory exhibits Coulomb interaction for small separation, a quark in one field theory exhibits spring-like confinement with an anti-quark in the other field theory. For the entangled states, we study how the quark–antiquark screening length depends on temperature and chemical potential.