Abstract

We study Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity with positive cosmological constant as a model for de Sitter quantum gravity. We focus on the quantum mechanics of the model at past and future infinity. There is a Hilbert space of asymptotic states and an infinite-time evolution operator between the far past and far future. This evolution is not unitary, although we find that it acts unitarily on a subspace up to non-perturbative corrections. These corrections come from processes which involve changes in the spatial topology, including the nucleation of baby universes. There is significant evidence that this 1+1 dimensional model is dual to a 0+0 dimensional matrix integral in the double-scaled limit. So the bulk quantum mechanics, including the Hilbert space and approximately unitary evolution, emerge from a classical integral. We find that this emergence is a robust consequence of the level repulsion of eigenvalues along with the double scaling limit, and so is rather universal in random matrix theory.

Highlights

  • Version of Vasiliev theory in four dimensions [4, 5], but that model is far from traditional Einstein gravity

  • We focus on the quantum mechanics of the model at past and future infinity

  • We would like to answer the following questions: what is the Hilbert space of asymptotic states? What is the inner product on the space? What is the bulk interpretation of operators which act on this space? Is infinite-time evolution unitary? Is the no-boundary state normalizable? We begin by re-examining the simplest amplitudes, from 1-boundary states to 1-boundary states, and recast this into the language of single-particle quantum mechanics

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Summary

Some review

Let us briefly review Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity with positive cosmological constant (see [21, 22]). One may exactly evaluate the JT partition function Zg,n,m on a genus g surface with n future boundaries and m past boundaries. While the metric (2.2) of global nearly dS2 space is symmetric under T, the dilaton profile is antisymmetric It is for this reason that we introduced the ± into the dilaton part of the nearly dS2 boundary condition, so T maps a past circle with some to a future circle with the same. Beyond the disk and annulus, there is significant evidence [22] that Zg,n,m is an analytic continuation of the partition function Zg,m+n of JT gravity in Euclidean AdS on a genus g surface with m + n boundaries, recently obtained in [24]

What are we computing?
Asymptotic Hilbert space and infinite evolution
One past boundary and one future boundary
Many boundaries and Fock space
Non-perturbative corrections
A few comments on horizon entropy
Matrix model interpretation
Matrix models and the holographic dictionary
Single-boundary transitions
Beyond the JT matrix integral
Discussion

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