'Micromanaging de Sitter holography'

Abstract

We develop tools to engineer de Sitter vacua with semi-holographic duals, using elliptic fibrations and orientifolds to uplift Freund-Rubin compactifications with CFT duals. The dual brane construction is compact and constitutes a microscopic realization of the dS/dS correspondence, realizing d-dimensional de Sitter space as a warped compactification down to (d-1)-dimensional de Sitter gravity coupled to a pair of large-N matter sectors. This provides a parametric microscopic interpretation of the Gibbons-Hawking entropy. We illustrate these ideas with an explicit class of examples in three dimensions, and describe ongoing work on four-dimensional constructions. The Gibbons-Hawking entropy of the de Sitter horizon [1] invites a microscopic interpretation and a holographic formulation of inflating spacetimes. Much progress was made in the analogous problem in black hole physics using special black holes in string theory whose microstates could be reliably counted, such as those analyzed in [2,3]; this led to the AdS/CFT correspondence [4]. In contrast, a microscopic understanding of the entropy of de Sitter space is more difficult for several reasons including its potential dynamical connections to other backgrounds (metastability), the absence of a non-fluctuating timelike boundary, and the absence of supersymmetry. In this paper, we develop a class of de Sitter constructions in string theory, built up from AdS/CFT dual pairs along the lines of [5], which are simple enough to provide a microscopic accounting of the parametric scaling of the Gibbons-Hawking entropy. These models realize microscopically a semi-holographic description of metastable de Sitter space which had been derived macroscopically in [6]. It would also be interesting to connect this to other approaches to de Sitter holography such as [7, 8] and to other manifestations of the de Sitter entropy such as [9]. The construction is somewhat analogous to neutral black branes analyzed in [11]. We will begin in section 2 by explaining the salient features of the holographic duality and of the de Sitter construction which realizes it microscopically. In section 3 we will lay out our methods in more detail, applying them to worked examples of dS{sub 3} in section 4. Finally, section 5 discusses further directions and ongoing work, including dS{sub 4} constructions in progress.