English

Hartle-Hawking Wave-Function for Flux Compactifications

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-09-17 v2 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We argue that the topological string partition function, which has been known to correspond to a wave-function, can be interpreted as an exact ``wave-function of the universe'' in the mini-superspace sector of physical superstring theory. This realizes the idea of Hartle and Hawking in the context of string theory, including all loop quantum corrections. The mini-superspace approximation is justified as an exact description of BPS quantities. Moreover this proposal leads to a conceptual explanation of the recent observation that the black hole entropy is the square of the topological string wave-function. This wave-function can be interpreted in the context of flux compactification of all spatial dimensions as providing a physical probability distribution on the moduli space of string compactification. Euclidean time is realized holographically in this setup.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0502211,
  title  = {Hartle-Hawking Wave-Function for Flux Compactifications},
  author = {Hirosi Ooguri and Cumrun Vafa and Erik Verlinde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0502211},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

37 pages, 2 figures