Census Taking in the Hat: FRW/CFT Duality

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic duality framework, called FRW/CFT, for describing eternal inflation and open FRW universes resulting from false vacuum decay, linking bulk cosmology to a boundary conformal field theory.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holographic duality for eternal inflation, connecting open FRW universes with a 2D Euclidean CFT including Liouville gravity, and explores its implications.

Findings

Dual CFT includes Liouville 2D gravity sector.

RG flow generates two space-time dimensions.

Provides insights into bubble collisions and memory persistence.

Abstract

In this paper a holographic description of eternal inflation is developed. We focus on the description of an open FRW universe that results from a tunneling event in which a false vacuum with positive vacuum energy decays to a supersymmetric vacuum with vanishing cosmological constant. The observations of a "Census Taker" in the final vacuum can be organized into a holographic dual conformal field theory that lives on the asymptotic boundary of space. We refer to this bulk-boundary correspondence as FRW/CFT duality. The dual CFT is a Euclidean two-dimensional theory that includes a Liouville 2-D gravity sector describing geometric fluctuations of the boundary. The RG flow of the theory is richer than in the ADS/CFT correspondence, and generates two space-time dimensions--one space-like and one time-like. We discuss a number of phenomena such as bubble collisions, and the Garriga, Guth, Vilenkin "persistence of memory," from the dual viewpoint.