Low-dimensional de Sitter quantum gravity

By Jordan S. Cotler, K. Jensen, A. Maloney. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study aspects of Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) quantum gravity in two-dimensional nearly de Sitter (dS) spacetime, as well as pure de Sitter quantum gravity in three dimensions. These are each theories of boundary modes, which include a reparameterization field on each connected component of the boundary as well as topological degrees of freedom. In two dimensions, the boundary theory is closely related to the Schwarzian path integral, and in three dimensions to the quantization of coadjoint orbits of the Virasoro group. Using these boundary theories we compute loop corrections to the wavefunction of the universe, and investigate gravitational contributions to scattering. Along the way, we show that JT gravity in dS 2 is an analytic continuation of JT gravity in Euclidean AdS 2 , and that pure gravity in dS 3 is a continuation of pure gravity in Euclidean AdS 3 . We define a genus expansion for de Sitter JT gravity by summing over higher genus generalizations of surfaces used in the Hartle-Hawking construction. Assuming a conjecture regarding the volumes of moduli spaces of such surfaces, we find that the de Sitter genus expansion is the continuation of the recently discovered AdS genus expansion. Then both may be understood as coming from the genus expansion of the same double-scaled matrix model, which would provide a non-perturbative completion of de Sitter JT gravity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94d2e7930e7bbc17fa5b3a5955277312c6a40df3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Stanford
2. S. Shenker
3. Phil Saad
4. E. Witten
5. J. Maldacena
6. Zhenbin Yang
7. G. Turiaci
8. D. Harlow

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. Stanford
2. Phil Saad
3. Zhenbin Yang
4. S. Shenker
5. E. Witten
6. J. Maldacena
7. G. Turiaci
8. Jordan S. Cotler

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. D. Stanford
2. Phil Saad
3. S. Shenker
4. Zhenbin Yang
5. E. Witten
6. G. Turiaci
7. Jordan S. Cotler
8. K. Jensen

Citations in the corpus

• Late Time Correlation Functions, Baby Universes, and ETH in JT Gravity (2019, background): “We are typically interested in quantities that involve imposing asymptotically AdS boundary conditions, but we may also include (19)These topology changing effects were studied in [14, 29, 51, 52] and discussed in [40, 41].”
• Islands in cosmology (2020, unknown): “For details about this model see [79–82].”
• Replica wormholes and the black hole interior (2019, background): “-of-the-world brane model for near-extremal black holes in section 2. This model is a two dimensional nearly de Sitter space described by Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity with positive cosmological constant [48, 77]. We take the asymptotic time slice to be a segment that starts and ends on two EOW branes w”
• JT gravity and the ensembles of random matrix theory (2019, background): “Further work has included generalizations to include higher spin fields [29], supersymmetry [30], different topologies [31, 32, 23, 26], and de Sitter space [33, 34].”