Finite-volume holography and the cosmological constant
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Holographic duality has revolutionized research in quantum gravity over the past 25 years. It postulates that the partition functions of gravitational systems with negative cosmological constant (whose classical solutions are Anti-de Sitter or AdS spacetimes) correspond exactly to those of conformal field theories with one fewer spatial dimension. This "AdS/CFT correspondence" provides a tractable and non-perturbative computational framework which circumvents the traditional challenges presented by the direct quantization of gravity, which is non-renormalizable. However, observational evidence indicates that our universe has a positive cosmological constant, i.e. that its late-time description (ignoring metastability) is asymptotically de Sitter, rather than Anti-de Sitter. It is an open challenge to formulate holography consistently with such empirical observations, but restricting the duality to a causal patch of de Sitter spacetime, e.g. the static observer patch (the one which we in principle inhabit), gives us a number of handles on the problem. In this thesis, I will demonstrate how proposals for a finite-volume formulation of Anti-de Sitter holography, stemming from properties of "T T-bar"-deformed 2D quantum field theories, can be modified to account for the Gibbons-Hawking entropy of 3D de Sitter spacetime. I also discuss various tests of the finite-volume correspondence, demonstrating how bulk boundary conditions can be changed, and presenting top-down analogs in string theory.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Coleman, Evan Austen |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Silverstein, Eva, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Silverstein, Eva, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Kallosh, Renata |
| Thesis advisor | Schleier-Smith, Monika |
| Degree committee member | Kallosh, Renata |
| Degree committee member | Schleier-Smith, Monika |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Physics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Evan Austen Coleman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Physics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/mj248gb7617 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Evan Austen Coleman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
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