A measure on the space of CFTs and pure 3D gravity

Abstract

We define a normalizable measure on the space of two-dimensional conformal field theories, which we interpret as a maximum ignorance ensemble. We test whether pure quantum gravity in AdS$_3$ is dual to the average over this ensemble. We find a negative answer, which implies that CFTs with a primary gap of order the central charge are highly atypical in our ensemble. We provide evidence that more generally, holographic CFTs are atypical in the space of all CFTs by finding similar results for permutation orbifolds: subgroups of $S_N$ with a good large $N$ limit are very sparse in the space of all subgroups. Along the way, we derive several new results on the space of CFTs. Notably we derive an upper bound on the spacing in central charge between CFTs, which is doubly exponentially small in the large central charge limit.