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Cited by 261

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 12 of the 12 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Wormholes, emergent gauge fields, and the weak gravity conjecture

Open access
Harlow, Daniel·2016·Journal of High Energy Physics

Abstract

This paper revisits the question of reconstructing bulk gauge fields as boundary operators in AdS/CFT. In the presence of the wormhole dual to the thermofield double state of two CFTs, the existence of bulk gauge fields is in some tension with the microscopic tensor factorization of the Hilbert space. I explain how this tension can be resolved by splitting the gauge field into charged constituents, and I argue that this leads to a new argument for the “principle of completeness”, which states that the charge lattice of a gauge theory coupled to gravity must be fully populated. I also claim that it leads to a new motivation for (and a clarification of) the “weak gravity conjecture”, which I interpret as a strengthening of this principle. This setup gives a simple example of a situation where describing low-energy bulk physics in CFT language requires knowledge of high-energy bulk physics. This contradicts to some extent the notion of “effective conformal field theory”, but in fact is an expected feature of the resolution of the black hole information problem. An analogous factorization issue exists also for the gravitational field, and I comment on several of its implications for reconstructing black hole interiors and the emergence of spacetime more generally.

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Metadata

Authors
Harlow, D.
Venue
Journal of High Energy Physics
Published
2016-01
Volume
2016
Issue
1
ISSN
1029-8479 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1821822517
Cited by
261
References
12
FWCI
17.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Wormholes, emergent gauge fields, and the weak gravity conjecture. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1007/jhep01(2016)122
The paper
Harlow, D. (2016). Wormholes, emergent gauge fields, and the weak gravity conjecture. Journal of High Energy Physics. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep01(2016)122

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.