Cosmology from the vacuum

TL;DR

This paper proposes a holographic duality framework for cosmology with a negative cosmological constant, allowing non-perturbative analysis of accelerated expansion and perturbations via a static AdS wormhole dual.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holographic model linking cosmological evolution to vacuum physics in a static AdS spacetime, enabling calculations without UV details.

Findings

Cosmological observables can be computed from the dual AdS spacetime.

The model describes a universe with a negative cosmological constant that recollapses.

Perturbations in cosmology can be derived from the dual vacuum physics.

Abstract

We argue that standard tools of holography can be used to describe fully non-perturbative microscopic models of cosmology in which a period of accelerated expansion may result from the positive potential energy of time-dependent scalar fields evolving towards a region with negative potential. In these models, the fundamental cosmological constant is negative, and the universe eventually recollapses in a time-reversal symmetric way. The microscopic description naturally selects a special state for the cosmology. In this framework, physics in the cosmological spacetime is dual to the vacuum physics in a static planar asymptotically AdS Lorentzian wormhole spacetime, in the sense that the background spacetimes and observables are related by analytic continuation. The dual spacetime is weakly curved everywhere, so any cosmological observables can be computed in the dual picture via effective field theory without detailed knowledge of the UV completion or the physics near the big bang. In particular, while inflation may explain the origin of perturbations in the cosmology picture, the perturbations can be deduced from the dual picture without any knowledge of the inflationary potential.