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We introduce and study a candidate gravity dual to the double scaled SYK model in the form of an exactly soluble 2D de Sitter gravity model consisting of two spacelike Liouville CFTs with complex central charge adding up to $c_+ + c_- = 26$. In [1] it was shown that the two-point function of physical operators in a doubled SYK model matches in the semi-classical limit with the Green's function of a massive scalar field in 3D de Sitter space. As further evidence of the duality, we adapt a result from Zamolodchikov to compute the boundary two-point function of the 2D Liouville-de Sitter gravity model on a disk and find that it reproduces the exact DSSYK two-point function to all orders in $\lambda=p^2/N$. We describe how the 2D Liouville-de Sitter gravity model arises from quantizing 3D de Sitter gravity., Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures

We further develop the description of three-dimensional quantum gravity with negative cosmological constant in terms of Virasoro TQFT formulated in our previous paper arXiv:2304.13650. We compare the partition functions computed in the Virasoro TQFT formalism to the semiclassical evaluation of Euclidean gravity partition functions. This matching is highly non-trivial, but can be checked directly in some examples. We then showcase the formalism in action, by computing the gravity partition functions of many relevant topologies. For holographic applications, we focus on the partition functions of Euclidean multi-boundary wormholes with three-punctured spheres as boundaries. This precisely quantifies the higher moments of the structure constants in the proposed ensemble boundary dual and subjects the proposal to thorough checks. Finally, we investigate in detail the example of the figure eight knot complement as a hyperbolic 3-manifold. We show that the Virasoro TQFT partition function is identical to the partition function computed in Teichm\"uller theory, thus giving strong evidence for the equivalence of these TQFTs. We also show how to produce a large class of manifolds via Dehn surgery on the figure eight knot., Comment: 54 pages

It has long been conjectured that the large $N$ deconfinement phase transition of $\mathcal{N}=4$ ${\rm SU}(N)$ super-Yang-Mills corresponds via AdS/CFT to the Hawking-Page transition in which black holes dominate the thermal ensemble, and quantitative evidence of this has come through the recent matching of the superconformal index of ${1\over 16}$-BPS states to the supersymmetric black hole entropy. We introduce the half-BPS Gukov-Witten surface defect as a probe of the superconformal index, which also serves as an order parameter for the deconfinement transition. This can be studied directly in field theory as a modification of the usual unitary matrix model or in the dual description as a D3-brane probe in the background of a (complex) supersymmetric black hole. Using a saddle point approximation, we determine our defect index in the large $N$ limit as a simple function of the chemical potentials and show independently that it is reproduced by the renormalized action of the brane in the black hole background. Along the way, we also comment on the Cardy limit and the thermodynamics of the D3-brane in the generalized ensemble. The defect index sharply distinguishes between the confining and the deconfining phases of the gauge theory and thus is a supersymmetric non-perturbative order parameter for these large $N$ phase transitions which deserves further investigation. Finally, our work provides an example where the properties of a black hole coupled to an external system can be analyzed precisely., Comment: 51 pages + appendices, 7 figures

We propose a precise reformulation of 3d quantum gravity with negative cosmological constant in terms of a topological quantum field theory based on the quantization of the Teichm\"uller space of Riemann surfaces that we refer to as ``Virasoro TQFT.'' This TQFT is similar, but importantly not equivalent, to $\text{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ Chern-Simons theory. This sharpens the folklore that 3d gravity is related to $\text{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ Chern-Simons theory into a precise correspondence, and resolves some well-known issues with this lore at the quantum level. Our proposal is computationally very useful and provides a powerful tool for the further study of 3d gravity. In particular, we explain how together with standard TQFT surgery techniques this leads to a fully algorithmic procedure for the computation of the gravity partition function on a fixed topology exactly in the central charge. Mathematically, the relation leads to many nontrivial conjectures for hyperbolic 3-manifolds, Virasoro conformal blocks and crossing kernels., Comment: 72 pages

$T\bar{T}$ deformed conformal field theories can be reformulated as worldsheet theories of non-critical strings. We use this correspondence to compute and study the $T\bar{T}$ deformed partition sum of a symmetric product CFT. We find that it takes the form of a partition sum of a second quantized string theory with a worldsheet given by the product of the seed CFT and a gaussian sigma model with the two-torus as target space. We show that deformed symmetric product theory admits a natural UV completion that exhibits a strong weak coupling $\mathbb{Z}_2$ duality that interchanges the momentum and winding numbers and maps the $T\bar{T}$-coupling $\lambda$ to its inverse $1/\lambda$. The $\mathbb{Z}_2$ duality is part of a full O$(2,2,\mathbb{Z})$-duality group that includes a PSL$(2,\mathbb{Z})$ acting on the complexified $T\bar{T}$ coupling. The duality symmetry eliminates the appearance of complex energies at strong coupling for all seed CFTs with central charge $c\leq 6$., Comment: 37 pages, v3: JHEP published version, comments, references added, typos corrected