Abstract:


We show that the presence of replica wormholes in the Euclidean path integral of gravity leads to a non-perturbative violation of any global symmetry present in the low-energy description of quantum gravity. Explicitly, we compute the scattering probability between different charged states in several low-dimensional models of quantum gravity and find a non-vanishing answer. This suggests that the set of all charged states is typically over-complete, which has drastic consequences for the fate of black hole remnants that could carry a global symmetry charge. In the holographic context, we argue that the presence of such a symmetry in the effective description of the bulk should appear on the boundary as an emergent global symmetry after ensemble averaging.