The central dogma and cosmological horizons

Journal Article · 23 January 2022 · Journal of High Energy Physics (Online)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep01(2022)132 · OSTI ID:1976435

Shaghoulian, Edgar  ^[1]

---

1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States); Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)

The central dogma of black hole physics – which says that from the outside a black hole can be described in terms of a quantum system with exp(Area/4G_N) states evolving unitarily – has recently been supported by computations indicating that the interior of the black hole is encoded in the Hawking radiation of the exterior. In this paper, we probe whether such a dogma for cosmological horizons has any support from similar computations. The fact that the de Sitter bifurcation surface is a minimax surface (instead of a maximin surface) causes problems with this interpretation when trying to import calculations analogous to the AdS case. This suggests anchoring extremal surfaces to the horizon itself, where we formulate a two-sided extremization prescription and find answers consistent with general expectations for a quantum theory of de Sitter space: vanishing total entropy, an entropy of A/4G_N when restricting to a single static patch, an entropy of a subregion of the horizon which grows as the region size grows until an island-like transition at half the horizon size when the entanglement wedge becomes the entire static patch interior, and a de Sitter version of the Hartman-Maldacena transition.

• Research Organization: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: Simons Foundation; USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0020360
• OSTI ID: 1976435
• Journal Information: Journal of High Energy Physics (Online), Journal Name: Journal of High Energy Physics (Online) Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 2022; ISSN 1029-8479
• Publisher: Springer NatureCopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English