The central dogma and cosmological horizons

Abstract

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$(\text{Area}/4G_N)$ 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.

24 pages, three appendices. v2-v3 references added

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• Entanglement in De Sitter Space
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• Holographic spacetime, black holes and quantum error correcting codes: A review
• Holographic Complexity in dS${}_{d+1}$
• BCFT in a Black Hole Background: An Analytical Holographic Model
• Complex geodesics in de Sitter space
• An Outsider's Perspective on Information Recovery in de Sitter Space
• Encoding beyond cosmological horizons in de Sitter JT gravity
• Black hole to cosmic horizon microstates in string/M theory: timelike boundaries and internal averaging
• Late-Time Correlators and Complex Geodesics in de Sitter Space
• Logarithmic Corrections, Entanglement Entropy, and UV Cutoffs in de Sitter Spacetime
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• Information paradox and island in quasi-de Sitter space
• Islands in Proliferating de Sitter Spaces
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• Unitary paradox of cosmological perturbations
• On the Spread of Entanglement at Finite Cutoff
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