On 2D gauge theories in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity

Abstract: The low-energy behavior of near-extremal black holes can be understood from the near-horizon AdS_2 region. In turn, this region is effectively described by using Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity coupled to Yang-Mills theory through the two-dimensional metric and the dilaton field. We show that such a two-dimensional model of gravity coupled to gauge fields is soluble for an arbitrary choice of gauge group and gauge couplings. Specifically, we determine the partition function of the theory on two-dimensional surfaces of arbitrary genus and with an arbitrary number of boundaries. When solely focusing on the contribution from surfaces with disk topology, we show that the gravitational gauge theory is described by the Schwarzian theory coupled to a particle moving on the gauge group manifold. When considering the contribution from all genera, we show that the theory is described by a particular double-scaled matrix integral, where the elements of the matrix are functions that map the gauge group manifold to complex or real numbers. Finally, we compute the expectation value of various diffeomorphism invariant observables in the gravitational gauge theory and find their exact boundary description.