Wormholes and half wormholes under irrelevant deformation

Recently it has been shown by Almheiri and Lin [1] that the reconstruction of a black-hole interior is sensitive to knowing the exact coupling of the boundary theory even if the coupling is irrelevant. This motivates us to enlarge the set of the one-time and two-time toy models inspired from the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev by deforming the same with irrelevant coupling. We find that half-wormholes, as well as the wormholes, persist in the presence of the deformation, leading to a similar mechanism for curing the factorization problem. While for the one-time case, the deformed partition function and its moments change by an overall factor, which can completely be absorbed into a renormalization of coupling; for the two-time (or coupled one-time) Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev we find nontrivial dynamics of the saddles as the couplings are varied. Curiously, the irrelevant deformations that we consider can also be thought of as an ensemble average over an overall scaling of the original undeformed Hamiltonian with an appropriate probability distribution; this allows for the possibility that half-wormholes may also be present in suitably defined ensemble of theories.

Automated summary

Recent research has shown that the reconstruction of a black-hole interior is sensitive to knowing the exact coupling of the boundary theory, even if the coupling is irrelevant. By deforming the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with irrelevant coupling, it has been found that half-wormholes and wormholes persist, offering a similar mechanism to address the factorization problem. The study also reveals nontrivial dynamics of saddles in the two-time Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model as the couplings are varied.