Holographic duals of JT gravity at finite cutoff: the classical case

Abstract

We formulate JT gravity with finite-cutoff boundaries and end-of-the-world branes in the first-order BF formulation. We dynamically reduce the BF model into a one-dimensional system living at the boundaries, generalizing earlier constructions. We obtain in particular a geometrical understanding of the phase space degrees of freedom associated to each of these boundaries. We leverage these results to probe bulk locality and the underlying structure of spacetime. Within our framework, we are able to derive a closed-form expression for the holographic Schwarzian description of JT gravity at finite-cutoff in phase space. The resulting degrees of freedom describe the embedding of the finite-cutoff curve in AdS$_2$. A quantization of these systems is presented in a companion paper.