Bulk Operators Research Articles

Bulk-induced D-brane deformations and the string coupling constant

We consider computing the on-shell disk action of open-closed string field theory as a gauge-invariant way of capturing the shift in D-brane tension that is induced by a deformation of the bulk CFT. We study the effect of bulk matter deformations (both marginal and relevant) on a wide range of boundary conditions in a number of CFTs up to subleading (two-loop) order in perturbation theory. In all analyzed examples, we find that the shift in the g-function of the matter boundary state is always accompanied by a boundary-independent shift in the string coupling constant, whose leading behaviour is universally proportional to the sphere two-point function of the deforming bulk operator.

Flat limit of massless scalar scattering in AdS2

We explore the flat limit of massless scalar scattering in AdS2. We derive the 1→1S-matrix from the CFT 2-point function. We show a key property of the 2→2S-matrix in 2d, where the contact interaction in the flat limit gives momentum conserving delta function. We show the factorization of the n→nS-matrix for integrable models in the flat limit, focusing on contact interactions. We calculate the S-matrix by linking the CFT operator on the AdS boundary to the scattering state in flat-space. We use bulk operator reconstruction to study massless scalar scattering in the flat limit and solve the Klein-Gordon equation in global AdS2 for the massless scalar field. The solution is simple, involving a pure phase in global time and a sinusoidal function in the radial coordinate. This simplicity also extends to the smearing function, allowing us to map the scattering state to the CFT operator while taking AdS corrections into account.

Bulk reconstruction from generalized free fields

We propose a generalized protocol for constructing a dual free bulk theory from any boundary model of generalized free fields (GFFs). To construct the bulk operators, we employ a linear ansatz similar to the Hamilton-Kabat-Liftschytz-Lowe (HKLL) construction. However, unlike the HKLL construction, our protocol relies only on boundary data with no presupposed form for the bulk equations of motion, so our reconstructed bulk is fully emergent. For a (1+1)d bulk, imposing the bulk operator algebra as well as a causal structure is sufficient to determine the bulk operators and dynamics uniquely up to an unimportant local basis choice. We study the bulk construction for several two-sided SYK models with and without coupling between the two sides, and find good agreement with known results in the low-temperature conformal limit. In particular, we find bulk features consistent with the presence of a black hole horizon for the TFD state, and characterize the infalling fermion modes. We are also able to extract bulk quantities such as the curvature and bulk state correlators in terms of boundary quantities. In the presence of coupling between the two SYK models, we are able to observe evidence of the shockwave geometry and the traversable wormhole geometry using the two-sided mutual information between the reconstructed bulk operators. Our results show evidence that features of the geometric bulk can survive away from the low temperature conformal limit. Furthermore, the generality of the protocol allows it to be applied to other boundary theories with no canonical holographic bulk.

CFT reconstruction of local bulk operators in half-Minkowski space

We construct a holographic map that reconstructs massless fields (scalars, Maxwell field, and Fierz-Pauli field) in half-Minkowski spacetime in d+1 dimensions terms of smeared primary operators in a large-N factorizable CFT in Rd−1,1. This map is based on a Weyl (rescaling) transformation from the Poincaré wedge of AdS to the Minkowski half-space and on the Hamilton-Kabat-Lifschytz-Lowe smearing function, which reconstructs local bulk operators in the Poincaré AdS in terms of smeared operators on the conformal boundary of the Poincaré wedge. The massless scalar field is reconstructed up to the level of two-point functions, while the Maxwell field and massless spin-2 fields are reconstructed at the level of the one-point function. We also discuss potential ways the map can be generalized to higher dimensions, and to the full Minkowski space. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Bulk reconstruction and non-isometry in the backwards-forwards holographic black hole map

The backwards-forwards map, introduced as a generalization of the non-isometric holographic maps of the black hole interior of Akers, Engelhardt, Harlow, Penington, and Vardhan to include non-trivial dynamics in the effective description, has two possible formulations differing in when the post-selection is performed. While these two forms are equivalent on the set of dynamically generated states — states formed from unitary time evolution acting on well-defined initial configurations of infalling matter — they differ on the generic set of states necessary to describe the apparent world of the infalling observer. We show that while both versions successfully reproduce the Page curve, the version involving post-selection as the final step, dubbed the backwards-forwards-post-selection (BFP) map, has the desirable properties of being non-isometric but isometric on average and providing state-dependent reconstruction of bulk operators, while the other version does not. Thus the BFP map is a suitable non-isometric code describing the black hole interior including interior interactions.

Abstract 2351: Genomics annotation and interpretation in somatic oncology using structured data from a clinical knowledgebase

Abstract Accurate and comprehensive interpretation of genomic variants has become a bottleneck in clinical sequencing applications due to the accelerating precision oncology and biomedical information explosion. This motivated us to build Ephesus, a framework enabling curation of predictive, prognostic and diagnostic evidence for clinical biomarkers in cancers. Currently Ephesus is the primary content source for Roche navify Mutation Profiler (nMP). The Ephesus’ data model ensures adherence to best practices in clinical genomic content curation. Variant classification follows the AMP guidelines for somatic variant interpretation. Variant interpretations are derived from international regulatory approvals and clinical practice guidelines (FDA, EMA, TGA, eVIQ, etc.) and recommendations (NCCN, ESMO). The data model is mapped to a set of relational tables. To enforce data integrity and validity, strategies such as data normalization based on standard nomenclatural ontologies, a submit-review-approval workflow, and biological constraints are adopted. Ephesus is deployed as a web application used by curators inside and outside Roche. The UI allows users to conduct edits, filtering, sorting and bulk operations on entities by attributes. In order to minimize manual effort and maximize content coverage, inference rules are applied before ingesting into nMP. Currently Ephesus is developed for data collection, browsing and summarizing primary entities such as biomarkers, evidence items, genes, variants, variant groups, and drugs. The content from the 2023-Aug snapshot contains 11,596 directly curated biomarker profiles (including biomarker combinations), and 6M+ expanded profiles for 41 major cancer types. To evaluate the clinical reporting value of the curated knowledge, ~160k real cancer patient samples of the AACR GENIE project were queried on Ephesus. Compared with three other major knowledgebases, Ephesus/NMP is observed showing the highest performance. Table 1. Percentage of patients or biomarkers with at least one interpretation from each knowledgebase CGI (2022-10-17) CIVIC(2023-09-01) ClinVar(2023-09-09) NMP(2023-08-11) AACR-Genie-v14.0 Total patient % with any interpretation 25% (40,545) 46% (73,835) 81% (130,882) 89% (142,905) 160,965 biomarker % (including combos) with any interpretation 0.03% (256) 0.06% (526) 13.26% (122,424) 73.79% (681,128) 923,093 Citation Format: Jian Li, Lili Niu, Shuba krishna, Fnu Kinshuk, Martin Jones, Carlos Hernandez, Michael Clark, Sandra Balladares. Genomics annotation and interpretation in somatic oncology using structured data from a clinical knowledgebase [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 2351.

Bulk reconstruction using timelike entanglement in (A)dS

It is well known that the entanglement entropies for spacelike subregions, and the associated modular Hamiltonians play a crucial role in the bulk reconstruction program within anti–de Sitter (AdS) holography. Explicit examples of the Hamilton-Kabat-Lifschytz-Lowe (HKLL) map exist mostly for the cases where the emergent bulk region is the so-called entanglement wedge of the given boundary subregion. However, motivated from the complex pseudoentropy in Euclidean conformal field theories (CFT), one can talk about a “timelike entanglement” in Lorentzian CFTs dual to AdS spacetimes. One can then utilize this boundary timelike entanglement to define a boundary “timelike modular Hamiltonian.” We use constraints involving these Hamiltonians in a manner similar to how it was used for spacelike cases, and write down bulk operators in regions which are not probed by an RT surface corresponding to a single CFT. In the context of two-dimensional CFT, we rederive the HKLL formulas for free bulk scalar fields in three examples: in AdS Poincaré patch, inside and outside of the AdS black hole, and for de Sitter flat slicings. In this method, one no longer requires the knowledge of bulk dynamics for subhorizon holography. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Holographic tensor networks with bulk gauge symmetries

Tensor networks are useful toy models for understanding the structure of entanglement in holographic states and reconstruction of bulk operators within the entanglement wedge. They are, however, constrained to only prepare so-called “fixed-area states” with flat entanglement spectra, limiting their utility in understanding general features of holographic entanglement. Here, we overcome this limitation by constructing a variant of random tensor networks that enjoys bulk gauge symmetries. Our model includes a gauge theory on a general graph, whose gauge-invariant states are fed into a random tensor network. We show that the model satisfies the quantum-corrected Ryu-Takayanagi formula with a nontrivial area operator living in the center of a gauge-invariant algebra. We also demonstrate nontrivial, n-dependent contributions to the Rényi entropy and Rényi mutual information from this area operator, a feature shared by general holographic states.

Bulk Operator Reconstruction in Topological Tensor Network and Generalized Free Fields.

In this paper, we study operator reconstruction in a class of holographic tensor networks describing renormalization group flows studied in arXiv:2210.12127. We study examples of 2D bulk holographic tensor networks constructed from Dijkgraaf-Witten theories and find that for both the Zn group and the S3 group, the number of bulk operators behaving like a generalized free field in the bulk scales as the order of the group. We also generalize our study to 3D bulks and find the same scaling for Zn theories. However, there is no generalized free field when the bulk comes from more generic fusion categories such as the Fibonacci model.

On the resilience of the gravitational variational principle under renormalization

A well-defined variational principle for gravitational actions typically requires to cancel boundary terms produced by the variation of the bulk action with a suitable set of boundary counterterms. This can be achieved by carefully balancing the coefficients multiplying the bulk operators with those multiplying the boundary ones. A typical example of this construction is the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary action that needs to be added to the Einstein-Hilbert one in order to have a well-defined metric variation for General Relativity with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Quantum fluctuations of matter fields lead to a renormalization of these coefficients which may or may not preserve this balance. Indeed, already at the level of General Relativity, the resilience of the matching between bulk and boundary constants is far from obvious and it is anyway incomplete given that matter generically induces quadratic curvature operators. We investigate here the resilience of the matching of higher-order couplings upon renormalization by a non-minimally coupled scalar field and show that a problem is present. Even though we do not completely solve the latter, we show that it can be greatly ameliorated by a wise splitting between dynamical and topological contributions. Doing so, we find that the bulk-boundary matching is preserved up to a universal term (present for any Weyl invariant matter field content), whose nature and possible cancellation we shall discuss in the end.

Black hole interior Petz map reconstruction and Papadodimas-Raju proposal

We study the reconstruction of the bulk operators in AdS/CFT when the geometry contains a black hole. The black hole exterior can be mapped to the CFT via a very simple Petz map which coincides with the HKLL map reconstruction of the black hole exterior. For the interior modes of the bulk theory, using the definition of the Petz recovery channel in modular theory, we can find the mapping from the black hole interior to the dual boundary theory. In the case of the evaporating black hole, it is expected that the interior modes map to some operators that have support only on the bath system, the cavity that absorbs the Hawking radiation. The most important observation that we have here is that in the case that we have a typical black hole microstate in the bulk, the CFT dual of the interior modes that we can find using the Petz recovery channel are exactly the operators that so-called “mirror operator “ in the Papadodimas-Raju proposal. Therefore, we can interpret Papadodimas-Raju proposal as an example of the Petz map reconstruction. It may help us answer some open questions about their procedure.

’t Hooft loops and integrability

We consider the defect CFT defined by a ’t Hooft line embedded in mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills theory. By explicitly quantizing around the given background we exactly reproduce a prediction from S-duality for the correlators between the ’t Hooft line and chiral primaries in the bulk and pave the way for higher loop analyses for non-protected operators. Furthermore, we demonstrate at the leading perturbative order that correlators between the ’t Hooft line and non-protected bulk operators can be efficiently computed using integrability. As a byproduct we find new integrable overlaps in mathfrak{sl} (2) spin chains in different representations.

Conformal dispersion relations for defects and boundaries

We derive a dispersion relation for two-point correlation functions in defect conformal field theories. The correlator is expressed as an integral over a (single) discontinuity that is controlled by the bulk channel operator product expansion (OPE). This very simple relation is particularly useful in perturbative settings where the discontinuity is determined by a subset of bulk operators. In particular, we apply it to holographic correlators of two chiral primary operators in \mathcal{N}=4𝒩=4 Super Yang-Mills theory in the presence of a supersymmetric Wilson line. With a very simple computation, we are able to reproduce and extend existing results. We also propose a second relation, which reconstructs the correlator from a double discontinuity, and is controlled by the defect channel OPE. Finally, for the case of codimension-one defects (boundaries and interfaces) we derive a dispersion relation which receives contributions from both OPE channels and we apply it to the boundary correlator in the O(N) critical model. We reproduce the order \epsilon^2ϵ2 result in the \epsilonϵ-expansion using as input a finite number of boundary CFT data.

Holography of information in massive gravity using Dirac brackets

The principle of holography of information states that in massless gravity, it is possible to extract bulk information using asymptotic boundary operators. In our work, we study this principle in a linearized setting about empty flat space and formulate it using Dirac brackets between boundary Hamiltonian and bulk operators. We then address whether the storage of bulk information in flat space linearized massive gravity resembles that of massless gravity. For linearized massless gravity, using Dirac brackets, we recover the necessary criteria for the holography of information. In contrast, we show that the Dirac bracket of the relevant boundary observable with bulk operators vanishes for massive gravity. We use this important distinction to outline the canonical Hilbert space. This leads to split states, and consequently, one cannot use asymptotic boundary observables to extract bulk information in massive gravity. We also argue the split property directly without an explicit reference to the Hilbert space. The result reflects that we can construct local bulk operators in massive gravity about the vacuum, which are obscured from boundary observables due to the lack of diffeomorphism invariance. Our analysis sheds some light on evaporating black holes in the context of the islands proposal.

Analytic bootstrap for the localized magnetic field

We study the two-point function of local operators in the critical O(N) model in the presence of a magnetic field localized on a line. We use a recently developed conformal dispersion relation to compute the correlator at first order in the ϵ-expansion and we extract the full set of defect and bulk CFT data using the Lorentzian inversion formulae. The only input for the computation of the connected correlator is its discontinuity at first order in perturbation theory, which is determined by the anomalous dimension of a single bulk operator. We discuss possible low-spin ambiguities and perform several diagrammatic checks of our results.

Dressing bulk spinor fields in AdS3

We continue the program of bulk reconstruction for fermionic fields. We reconstruct, from the CFT, the Dirac fermion field in AdS3 coupled to a Chern-Simons gauge field. We show that the three conditions; solving the equation of motion, satisfying expected transformation under modular flow and a simple charge distribution at infinity are all compatible and all produce the same bulk operator. We also compute the bulk-boundary tree level three point function from the CFT construction.

Bulk–edge correspondence for unbounded Dirac–Landau operators

We consider two-dimensional unbounded magnetic Dirac operators, either defined on the whole plane or with infinite mass boundary conditions on a half-plane. Our main results use techniques from elliptic PDEs and integral operators, while their topological consequences are presented as corollaries of some more general identities involving magnetic derivatives of local traces of fast decaying functions of the bulk and edge operators. One of these corollaries leads to the so-called Středa formula: if the bulk operator has an isolated compact spectral island, then the integrated density of states of the corresponding bulk spectral projection varies linearly with the magnetic field as long as the gaps between the spectral island and the rest of the spectrum are not closed, and the slope of this variation is given by the Chern character of the projection. The same bulk Chern character is related to the number of edge states that appear in the gaps of the bulk operator.

Boundary Chiral Algebras and Holomorphic Twists

We study the holomorphic twist of 3d \(\mathcal{N}=2\) gauge theories in the presence of boundaries, and the algebraic structure of bulk and boundary local operators. In the holomorphic twist, both bulk and boundary local operators form chiral algebras (a.k.a. vertex algebras). The bulk algebra is commutative, endowed with a shifted Poisson bracket and a “higher” stress tensor; while the boundary algebra is a module for the bulk, may not be commutative, and may or may not have a stress tensor. We explicitly construct bulk and boundary algebras for free theories and Landau–Ginzburg models. We construct boundary algebras for gauge theories with matter and/or Chern–Simons couplings, leaving a full description of bulk algebras to future work. We briefly discuss the presence of higher A-infinity like structures.

Holographic Relative Entropy in Infinite-Dimensional Hilbert Spaces

We reformulate entanglement wedge reconstruction in the language of operator-algebra quantum error correction with infinite-dimensional physical and code Hilbert spaces. Von Neumann algebras are used to characterize observables in a boundary subregion and its entanglement wedge. Assuming that the infinite-dimensional von Neumann algebras associated with an entanglement wedge and its complement may both be reconstructed in their corresponding boundary subregions, we prove that the relative entropies measured with respect to the bulk and boundary observables are equal. We also prove the converse: when the relative entropies measured in an entanglement wedge and its complement equal the relative entropies measured in their respective boundary subregions, entanglement wedge reconstruction is possible. Along the way, we show that the bulk and boundary modular operators act on the code subspace in the same way. For holographic theories with a well-defined entanglement wedge, this result provides a well-defined notion of holographic relative entropy.

Reconstructing bulk equation of motion using CFT modular Hamiltonians

In the framework of bulk reconstruction, we elucidate the relationship between the action of CFT modular Hamiltonians on bulk operators, the possible equation of motion for the bulk operators, and the charge distribution at infinity corresponding to such bulk fields. In particular for scalar fields interacting with gravity or with gauge fields, we show how CFT considerations of the action of the modular Hamiltonian constrain the possible bulk equation of motion to be consistent with bulk gauge invariance and diffeomorphism invariance. In fact we show that requiring that the action of the modular Hamiltonian on a dressed bulk scalar operator be compatible with some unknown simple equation of motion, fixes, under reasonable assumptions, both the equation of motion and the action of the modular Hamiltonian once the first order frac{1}{N} terms are known.