The dS/CFT Correspondence and the Big Smash

By B. McInnes. 2001

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations suggest that the cosmological equation-of-state parameter w is close to -1. To say this is to imply that w could be slightly less than -1, which leads to R. Caldwell's ``Phantom cosmologies''. These often have the property that they end in a ``Big Smash'', a final singularity in which the Universe is destroyed in a finite proper time by excessive expansion. We show that, classically, this fate is not inevitable: there exist Smash-free Phantom cosmologies, obtained by a suitable perturbation of the de Sitter equation of state, in which the spacetime is in fact asymptotically de Sitter. [ Contrary to popular belief, such cosmologies, which violate the Dominant Energy Condition, do not necessarily violate causality.] We also argue, however, that the physical interpretation of these classically acceptable spacetimes is radically altered by ``holography'', as manifested in the dS/CFT correspondence. It is shown that, if the boundary CFTs have conventional properties, then recent ideas on ``time as an inverse renormalization group flow'' can be used to rule out these cosmologies. Very recently, however, it has been argued that the CFTs in dS/CFT are of a radically unconventional form, and this opens up the possibility that Smash-free Phantom spacetimes offer a simple model of a ``bouncing'' cosmology in which the quantum-mechanical entanglement of the field theories in the infinite past and future plays an essential role.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c116612d8a76d677aa1f8276716e236476642111

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Citations in the corpus

Braneworld models of dark energy (2002, background): “Some strange properties of phantom energy with a very negative equation of state (w < −1) are summarised below (see also [21,23]): (i) A negative equation of state suggests that the effective velocity of sound in the medium v = √|dp/dρ| can become larger than the velocity of light.”
Is there supernova evidence for dark energy metamorphosis (2003, background): “(i) DE with w −1 (Chiba, Okabe & Yamaguchi 2000; Caldwell 2002; McInnes 2002; Sahni & Shtanov 2003; Alam & Sahni 2002; Caldwell, Kamionkowski & Weinberg 2003; Carroll, Hoffman & Trodden 2003; Frampton 2003; Frampton & Takahashi 2003; Singh, Sami & Dadhich 2003; Johri 2003).”