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De Sitter Bra-Ket Wormholes

Alessandro Fumagalli, Victor Gorbenko, Joshua Kames-King

15/8/24 Published in : arXiv:2408.08351

We study a model for the initial state of the universe based on a gravitational path integral that includes connected geometries which simultaneously produce bra and ket of the wave function. We argue that a natural object to describe this state is the Wigner distribution, which is a function on a classical phase space obtained by a certain integral transform of the density matrix. We work with Lorentzian de Sitter Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity in which we find semiclassical saddle-points for pure gravity, as well as when we include matter components such as a CFT and a classical inflaton field. We also discuss different choices of fixing time reparametrizations. In the regime of large universes our connected geometry dominates over the Hartle-Hawking saddle and gives a distribution that has a meaningful probabilistic interpretation for local observables. It does not, however, give a normalizable probability measure on the entire phase space of the theory.

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Phase I & II research project(s)

  • String Theory
  • Quantum Systems
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  • Statistical Mechanics
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  • Holography and bulk-boundary correspondence

AI-assisted Automated Short Answer Grading of Handwritten University Level Mathematics Exams

Boundary conditions and violations of bulk-edge correspondence in a hydrodynamic model

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