Holographic Description of Vacuum Bubbles

Abstract

We discuss a holographic description of vacuum bubbles, with possible implications for a consistent description of the multiverse. In particular, we elaborate on the recent observation by Maldacena, that the interior of AdS bubbles can be described in terms of CFT degrees of freedom living on the worldsheet of the bubble wall. We consider the scattering of bulk gravitons in the ambient parent vacuum, off the bubble wall. In the dual description, the transmission coefficient is interpreted as the probability that a graviton is absorbed by the worldsheet CFT degrees of freedom. The result is in agreement with intuitive expectations. Conformal invariance is not exact in this setup, and the leading corrections due to the IR and UV cut-offs are displayed. Aside from bulk scattering states, we find that when a bubble nucleates within a parent dS vacuum, there is a zero mode of the graviton which describes lower dimensional gravity with a finite Newton's constant. This massless graviton lives within one Hubble radius away from the bubble wall. Possible implications for a fully holographic description of the inflating multiverse are briefly discussed.