No Arabic abstract
The equilibrium state of fields in the causal wedge of a dS observer is thermal, though realistic observers have only partial access to the state. To them, out-of-equilibrium states of a light scalar field appear to thermalize in a Markovian fashion. We show this by formulating a systematic expansion for tracing out the environment. As an example, we calculate the $O(lambda)$ correction to the result of Starobinsky and Yokoyama for the relaxation exponents of $lambda phi^4$ theory.
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.
Bubbles of nothing are a class of vacuum decay processes present in some theories with compactified extra dimensions. We investigate the existence and properties of bubbles of nothing in models where the scalar pseudomoduli controlling the size of the extra dimensions are stabilized at positive vacuum energy, which is a necessary feature of any realistic model. We map the construction of bubbles of nothing to a four-dimensional Coleman-De Luccia problem and establish necessary conditions on the asymptotic behavior of the scalar potential for the existence of suitable solutions. We perform detailed analyses in the context of five-dimensional theories with metastable $text{dS}_4 times S^1$ vacua, using analytic approximations and numerical methods to calculate the decay rate. We find that bubbles of nothing sometimes exist in potentials with no ordinary Coleman-De Luccia decay process, and that in the examples we study, when both processes exist, the bubble of nothing decay rate is faster. Our methods can be generalized to other stabilizing potentials and internal manifolds.
We demonstrate that possession of a single negative mode is not a sufficient criterion for an instanton to mediate exponential decay. For example, de Sitter space is generically stable against decay via the Coleman-De Luccia instanton. This is due to the fact that the de Sitter Euclidean action is bounded below, allowing for an approximately de Sitter invariant false vacuum to be constructed.
We construct local probes in the static patch of Euclidean dS$_3$ gravity. These probes are Wilson line operators, designed by exploiting the Chern-Simons formulation of 3D gravity. Our prescription uses non-unitary representations of $so(4)simeq su(2)_Ltimes su(2)_R$, and we evaluate the Wilson line for states satisfying a singlet condition. We discuss how to reproduce the Greens functions of massive scalar fields in dS$_3$, the construction of bulk fields, and the quasinormal mode spectrum. We also discuss the interpretation of our construction in Lorentzian signature in the inflationary patch, via $SL(2,mathbb{C})$ Chern-Simons theory.