Spinning States and Unitarity in 3D Gravity

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Li, Ziyi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Li, Ziyi
author_facet Li, Ziyi
contents We revisit the proposal to cure the negative density of states in the three-dimensional gravitational path integral by adding spinning states whose spin scales with the central charge. We show that sub-extremal and extremal spinning states below the black hole threshold can cancel the known negativities, and interpret these states as bulk spinning defects. Additionally, certain overspinning states above the black hole threshold can cure these negativities while preserving the spectral gap. Previously interpreted as classical spinning strings, we instead identify these overspinning states with overspinning BTZ geometries, which are smooth pure gravity quotients of AdS$_3$ with no fixed points. All of these spinning geometries exhibit causal pathologies in their Lorentzian continuations. Moreover, the overspinning geometries arise from mixed elliptic-hyperbolic identifications and contain a right-moving temperature and quasinormal modes. We also generalize the computation of scalar correlators to the extremal and overspinning backgrounds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spinning States and Unitarity in 3D Gravity
Li, Ziyi
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
We revisit the proposal to cure the negative density of states in the three-dimensional gravitational path integral by adding spinning states whose spin scales with the central charge. We show that sub-extremal and extremal spinning states below the black hole threshold can cancel the known negativities, and interpret these states as bulk spinning defects. Additionally, certain overspinning states above the black hole threshold can cure these negativities while preserving the spectral gap. Previously interpreted as classical spinning strings, we instead identify these overspinning states with overspinning BTZ geometries, which are smooth pure gravity quotients of AdS$_3$ with no fixed points. All of these spinning geometries exhibit causal pathologies in their Lorentzian continuations. Moreover, the overspinning geometries arise from mixed elliptic-hyperbolic identifications and contain a right-moving temperature and quasinormal modes. We also generalize the computation of scalar correlators to the extremal and overspinning backgrounds.
title Spinning States and Unitarity in 3D Gravity
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14492