Unitarity in the presence of closed timelike curves

DOI10.1002/PROP.200510281zbMATH Open1090.81047arXivhep-th/0506104OpenAlexW2962980177MaRDI QIDQ5471099

No author found.

Publication date: 6 June 2006

Published in: Fortschritte der Physik (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We conjecture that, in certain cases, quantum dynamics is consistent in the presence of closed timelike curves. We consider time dependent orbifolds of three dimensional Minkowski space describing, in the limit of large AdS radius, BTZ black holes inside the horizon. Although perturbative unitarity fails, we show that, for discrete values of the gravitational coupling, particle propagation is consistent with unitarity. This quantization corresponds to the quantization of the black hole angular momentum, as expected from the dual CFT description. Note, however, that we recover this result by analyzing the physics inside the horizon and near the singularity. The spacetime under consideration has no AdS boundary, and we are therefore not using any assumption regarding a possible dual formulation. We perform the computation at very low energies, where string effects are irrelevant and interactions are dominated by graviton exchange in the eikonal regime. We probe the non-causal structure of space-time to leading order, but work to all orders in the gravitational coupling.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0506104

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Black holes (83C57) Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) String and superstring theories; other extended objects (e.g., branes) in quantum field theory (81T30)

Cites Work

The large \(N\) limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity