Instantons, Euclidean wormholes and AdS/CFT (2004.08956v2)

Abstract: I present an informal overview of several recent results about Euclidean saddle points sourced by axion fields in quantum gravity (AdS/CFT), such as wormholes, their extremal "D-instanton" limits and their under-extremal singular counterparts. Concerning wormholes we argue they cannot contribute to the path integral because a stability analysis suggests they fragment like other super-extremal objects. For concrete AdS/CFT embeddings the Euclidean saddle point solutions are neatly described by geodesic curves living inside moduli spaces and can typically be solved for using group theory. Our working example is $AdS_5\times S^5/\mathbb{Z}_k$ and allows for smooth Euclidean wormholes. For the supersymmetric D-instanton-like solutions we seem to find a match with the instantons in the dual $\mathcal{N}=2$ quivers. This match even extends a bit further to self-dual instantons without supersymmetry.