collaborators

8 papers

hep-th2026

Consistent Evaluation of the No-Boundary Proposal

Ahmed I. Abdalla, Stefano Antonini, Raphael Bousso +3

We revisit the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal. To extract probabilities, one must use the gravitational path integral (GPI) to compute not only the no-boundary amplitude, but…

hep-th2025

A Black Hole Airy Tail

Stefano Antonini, Luca V. Iliesiu, Pratik Rath +1

In Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity, which is dual to a random matrix ensemble, the annealed entropy differs from the quenched entropy at low temperatures and goes negative. However,…

hep-th2025

The Baby Universe is Fine and the CFT Knows It: On Holography for Closed Universes

Stefano Antonini, Pratik Rath, Martin Sasieta +2

Big bang/big crunch closed universes can be realized in AdS/CFT, even though they lack asymptotically AdS boundaries. With enough bulk entanglement, the bulk Hilbert space of a clo…

hep-th2025

Cosmology from random entanglement

Stefano Antonini, Martin Sasieta, Brian Swingle

We construct entangled microstates of a pair of holographic CFTs whose dual semiclassical description includes big bang-big crunch AdS cosmologies in spaces without boundaries. The…

hep-th2025

An apologia for islands

Stefano Antonini, Chang-Han Chen, Henry Maxfield +1

Entanglement islands have played a key role in the recent derivation of the Page curve and other progress on the black hole information problem. Arising from the inclusion of conne…

hep-th2025

The gravitational path integral from an observer's point of view

Ahmed I. Abdalla, Stefano Antonini, Luca V. Iliesiu +1

One of the fundamental problems in quantum gravity is to describe the experience of a gravitating observer in generic spacetimes. In this paper, we develop a framework for describi…