2014/09/19 by Netta Engelhardt, Thomas Hertog, Gary T. Horowitz · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics
paper · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.113.121602
To gain insight into the quantum nature of cosmological singularities, we study anisotropic Kasner solutions in gauge-gravity duality. The dual description of the bulk evolution towards the singularity involves N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on the expanding branch of deformed de Sitter space and is well defined. We compute two-point correlators of Yang-Mills operators of large dimensions using spacelike geodesics anchored on the boundary. The correlators show a strong signature of the singularity around horizon scales and decay at large boundary separation at different rates in different directions. More generally, the boundary evolution exhibits a process of particle creation similar to that in inflation. This leads us to conjecture that information on the quantum nature of cosmological singularities is encoded in long-wavelength features of the boundary wave function.