An algebra of observables for de Sitter space

By Venkat Chandrasekaran, Roberto Longo, Geoff Penington, E. Witten. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2022

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe an algebra of observables for a static patch in de Sitter space, with operators gravitationally dressed to the worldline of an observer. The algebra is a von Neumann algebra of Type II_1. There is a natural notion of entropy for a state of such an algebra. There is a maximum entropy state, which corresponds to empty de Sitter space, and the entropy of any semiclassical state of the Type II_1 algebras agrees, up to an additive constant independent of the state, with the expected generalized entropy S _gen = ( A/ 4 G _ N ) + S _out. An arbitrary additive constant is present because of the renormalization that is involved in defining entropy for a Type II_1 algebra.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f06b0c2f1e47997f5383e81e0413b0f5bcd4d46c

Citations in the corpus

• Analyticity and the Unruh effect: a study of local modular flow (2024, unknown): “…flow have been used to argue that a perturbative treatment of diffeomorphism invariance in quantum gravity leads to finite renormalized entropy differences for static anti-de Sitter black holes [22–24], the static patch of de Sitter spacetime [25], and more general spacetime regions [26, 27].”