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Euclidean axion wormholes have multiple negative modes

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arxiv 1811.12690 v2 pith:MH3ZOEEZ submitted 2018-11-30 hep-th gr-qc

Euclidean axion wormholes have multiple negative modes

classification hep-th gr-qc
keywords wormholesaxionactioneuclideangravitylowernegativeperturbations
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We show that Euclidean axion wormholes in theories of gravity coupled to a single axion have several independent inhomogeneous perturbations that lower the Euclidean action. Our analysis relies on a judiciously chosen gauge-invariant variable which makes the negative mode structure about axion wormholes transparent. Perturbations lowering the action are concentrated in the neck region and exist for wormholes in flat space and in AdS. Their presence means axion wormholes are not relevant saddle points of the functional integral in quantum gravity. This resolves the paradoxes associated with these solutions from the viewpoint of AdS/CFT. We conjecture that the lower action configurations one flows to are ensembles of microscopic `quantum wormholes' with unit charge.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

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