No Arabic abstract
In this essay, we discuss the fine-tuning problems of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant. We argue that these are indeed legitimate problems, as opposed to some other problems that are sometimes described using similar vocabulary. We then notice, following Tom Banks, that the problems become less compelling once we recognize that the Universe contains quantum gravity, and thus isnt fundamentally described by bulk QFT. Embracing this solution requires a reversal of the standard arrows UV->IR and past->future. The first reversal is familiar from AdS/CFT. The second reversal refers more specifically to our Universes cosmology, and is clearly in potential conflict with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the final part of the essay, we attempt to defuse this conflict, suggesting that the Second Law can arise naturally from de Sitter boundary conditions at future infinity.
Maximally symmetric curved-brane solutions are studied in dilatonic braneworld models which realise the self-tuning of the effective four-dimensional cosmological constant. It is found that no vacua in which the brane has de Sitter or anti-de Sitter geometry exist, unless one modifies the near-boundary asymptotics of the bulk fields. In the holographic dual picture, this corresponds to coupling the UV CFT to a curved metric (possibly with a defect). Alternatively, the same may be achieved in a flat-space QFT with suitable variable scalar sources. With these ingredients, it is found that maximally symmetric, positive and negative curvature solutions with a stabilised brane position generically exist. The space of such solutions is studied in two different types of realisations of the self-tuning framework. In some regimes we observe a large hierarchy between the curvature on the brane and the boundary UV CFT curvature. This is a dynamical effect due to the self-stabilisation mechanism. This setup provides an alternative route to realising de Sitter space in string theory.
Robinson-Wilczeks recent work shows that, the energy momentum tensor flux required to cancel gravitational anomaly at the event horizon of a Schwarzschild-type black hole has an equivalent form to that of a (1+1)-dimensional blackbody radiation at the Hawking temperature. Motivated by their work, Hawking radiation from the cosmological horizons of the general Schwarzschild-de Sitter and Kerr-de Sitter black holes, has been studied by the method of anomaly cancellation. The result shows that the absorbing gauge current and energy momentum tensor fluxes required to cancel gauge and gravitational anomalies at the cosmological horizon are precisely equal to those of Hawking radiation from it. It should be emphasized that the effective field theory for generic black holes in de Sitter spaces should be formulated within the region between the event horizon (EH) and the cosmological horizon (CH), to integrate out the classically irrelevant ingoing modes at the EH and the classically irrelevant outgoing modes at the CH, respectively.
We investigate the generalized second law of thermodynamics (GSL) in generalized theories of gravity. We examine the total entropy evolution with time including the horizon entropy, the non-equilibrium entropy production, and the entropy of all matter, field and energy components. We derive a universal condition to protect the generalized second law and study its validity in different gravity theories. In Einstein gravity, (even in the phantom-dominated universe with a Schwarzschild black hole), Lovelock gravity, and braneworld gravity, we show that the condition to keep the GSL can always be satisfied. In $f(R)$ gravity and scalar-tensor gravity, the condition to protect the GSL can also hold because the gravity is always attractive and the effective Newton constant should be approximate constant satisfying the experimental bounds.
We study the dS/CFT duality between minimal type-A higher-spin gravity and the free Sp(2N) vector model. We consider the bulk spacetime as elliptic de Sitter space dS_4/Z_2, in which antipodal points have been identified. We apply a technique from arXiv:1509.05890, which extracts the quantum-mechanical commutators (or Poisson brackets) of the linearized bulk theory in an *observable patch* of dS_4/Z_2 directly from the boundary 2-point function. Thus, we construct the Lorentzian commutators of the linearized bulk theory from the Euclidean CFT. In the present paper, we execute this technique for the entire higher-spin multiplet, using a higher-spin-covariant language, which provides a promising framework for the future inclusion of bulk interactions. Aside from its importance for dS/CFT, our construction of a Hamiltonian structure for a bulk causal region should be of interest within higher-spin theory itself. The price we pay is a partial symmetry breaking, from the full dS group (and its higher-spin extension) to the symmetry group of an observable patch. While the boundary field theory plays a role in our arguments, the results can be fully expressed within a boundary *particle mechanics*. Bulk fields arise from this boundary mechanics via a version of second quantization.
Light scalars in inflationary spacetimes suffer from logarithmic infrared divergences at every order in perturbation theory. This corresponds to the scalar field values in different Hubble patches undergoing a random walk of quantum fluctuations, leading to a simple toy landscape on superhorizon scales, in which we can explore questions relevant to eternal inflation. However, for a sufficiently long period of inflation, the infrared divergences appear to spoil computability. Some form of renormalization group approach is thus motivated to resum the log divergences of conformal time. Such a resummation may provide insight into De Sitter holography. We present here a novel diagrammatic analysis of these infrared divergences and their resummation. Basic graph theory observations and momentum power counting for the in-in propagators allow a simple and insightful determination of the leading-log contributions. One thus sees diagrammatically how the superhorizon sector consists of a semiclassical theory with quantum noise evolved by a first-order, interacting classical equation of motion. This rigorously leads to the Stochastic Inflation ansatz developed by Starobinsky to cure the scalar infrared pathology nonperturbatively. Our approach is a controlled approximation of the underlying quantum field theory and is systematically improvable.