English

Chaos and complementarity in de Sitter space

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-08-18 v3

Abstract

We consider small perturbations to a static three-dimensional de Sitter geometry. For early enough perturbations that satisfy the null energy condition, the result is a shockwave geometry that leads to a time advance in the trajectory of geodesics crossing it. This brings the opposite poles of de Sitter space into causal contact with each other, much like a traversable wormhole in Anti-de Sitter space. In this background, we compute out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) to asses the chaotic nature of the de Sitter horizon and find that it is maximally chaotic: one of the OTOCs we study decays exponentially with a Lyapunov exponent that saturates the chaos bound. We discuss the consequences of our results for de Sitter complementarity and inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.01326,
  title  = {Chaos and complementarity in de Sitter space},
  author = {Lars Aalsma and Gary Shiu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.01326},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

30 pages, 7 figures. v2: References and clarifications added. v3: Fixed typo in derivation of the shockwave geometry in appendix A

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:30:50.899Z