Towards a Big Crunch Dual

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence of asymptotically anti-de Sitter initial data evolving into a big crunch singularity, suggesting potential for dual CFT descriptions and insights into cosmic censorship violations.

Contribution

It establishes the presence of smooth initial data leading to big crunches in supergravity and explores implications for dual conformal field theories and cosmic censorship.

Findings

Existence of smooth asymptotically AdS data evolving to big crunch

Preliminary dual CFT analysis indicates the crunch as an endpoint

Any scalar soliton theory must admit negative energy solutions

Abstract

We show there exist smooth asymptotically anti-de Sitter initial data which evolve to a big crunch singularity in a low energy supergravity limit of string theory. This opens up the possibility of using the dual conformal field theory to obtain a fully quantum description of the cosmological singularity. A preliminary study of this dual theory suggests that the big crunch is an endpoint of evolution even in the full string theory. We also show that any theory with scalar solitons must have negative energy solutions. The results presented here clarify our earlier work on cosmic censorship violation in N=8 supergravity.