The holographic interpretation of JT-deformed CFTs
Authors: Adam Bzowski and Monica Guica
Preprint number: UUITP-09/18
Abstract: Recently, a non-local yet possibly UV-complete quantum field theory has been constructed by deforming a two-dimensional CFT by the composite operator JT, where J is a chiral U(1) current and T is a component of the stress tensor. Assuming the original CFT was a holographic CFT, we work out the holographic dual of its JT deformation. We find that the dual spacetime is still AdS3, but with modified boundary conditions that mix the metric and the Chern-Simons gauge field dual to the U(1) current. We show that the energy and thermodynamics of black holes obeying these modified boundary conditions precisely reproduce the previously derived field theory spectrum and thermodynamics, provided the contribution of the current takes a particular form we motivate. The associated asymptotic symmetry group consists of two copies of the Virasoro and one copy of the U(1) Kac-Moody algebra, just as before the deformation; the only effect of the latter is to modify the spacetime dependence of the right-moving Virasoro generators, whose action becomes state-dependent and effectively non-local.