The central dogma and cosmological horizons

Abstract: The central dogma of black hole physics – which says that from the outside a black hole can be described in terms of a quantum system with exp(Area/4G) states evolving unitarily – has recently been supported by computations indicating that the interior of the black hole is encoded in the Hawking radiation of the exterior. In this paper, we probe whether such a dogma for cosmological horizons has any support from similar computations. The fact that the de Sitter bifurcation surface is a minimax surface (instead of a maximin surface) causes problems with this interpretation when trying to import calculations analogous to the AdS case. This suggests anchoring extremal surfaces to the horizon itself, where we formulate a two-sided extremization prescription and find answers consistent with general expectations for a quantum theory of de Sitter space: vanishing total entropy, an entropy of A/4G when restricting to a single static patch, an entropy of a subregion of the horizon which grows with the region size and threatens the central dogma until an island-like transition at half the horizon size when the entanglement wedge becomes the entire static patch interior, and a de Sitter version of the Hartman-Maldacena transition.

cosmology and nongalactic astrophysicsgeneral relativity and quantum cosmologyHEP - phenomenologyHEP - theorymathematical physics

Audience: researchers in the discipline

AnLy Strings and Fields online seminars