Speaker
Description
I will describe a new class of semiclassical geometries capturing the quantum backreaction of thermal conformal fields in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space. These “quantum solitons” arise from placing a brane in the four-dimensional AdS C-metric. From the brane perspective, the construction gives solutions of three-dimensional gravity coupled to a strongly coupled holographic CFT. The resulting geometries fall into two families labelled by the asymptotic mass: one describes the backreaction of a thermal CFT state on global AdS₃, while the other exhibits a novel non-perturbative effect in which a black hole horizon present in the zero-backreaction limit is replaced by a smooth origin. I will give an overview of the construction of these solutions, their physical interpretation, and their relation to existing three-dimensional braneworld constructions.