Dual of big bang and big crunch

Abstract

Starting from the Janus solution and its gauge theory dual, we obtain the dual gauge theory description of the cosmological solution by the procedure of double analytic continuation. The coupling is driven either to zero or to infinity at the big-bang and big-crunch singularities, which are shown to be related by the $S$-duality symmetry. In the dual Yang-Mills theory description, these are nonsingular as the coupling goes to zero in the $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. The cosmological singularities simply signal the failure of the supergravity description of the full type IIB superstring theory.