English

Census Taking in the Hat: FRW/CFT Duality

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-04-07 v2

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0908.3844,
  title  = {Census Taking in the Hat: FRW/CFT Duality},
  author = {Yasuhiro Sekino and Leonard Susskind},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.3844},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

71 pages, 16 figures. A preliminary version of the ideas in this paper was reported in arXiv:0710.1129; v2: Corrected a typo in eq. (5.21).

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:39:14.224Z