De Sitter Bra-Ket wormholes

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 05-2025
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Article number 74
Volume | Issue number 2025 | 5
Organisations
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Institute of Physics (IoP) - Institute for Theoretical Physics Amsterdam (ITFA)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Institute of Physics (IoP)
Abstract

We study a model for the initial state of the universe based on a gravitational path integral that includes connected geometries which simultaneously produce bra and ket of the wave function. We argue that a natural object to describe this state is the Wigner distribution, which is a function on a classical phase space obtained by a certain integral transform of the density matrix. We work with Lorentzian de Sitter Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity in which we find semiclassical saddle-points for pure gravity, as well as when we include matter components such as a CFT and a classical inflaton field. We also discuss different choices of fixing time reparametrizations. In the regime of large universes our connected geometry dominates over the Hartle-Hawking saddle and gives a distribution that has a meaningful probabilistic interpretation for local observables. It does not, however, give a normalizable probability measure on the entire phase space of the theory.

Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.08351 https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2025)074
Other links https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105004860049
Downloads
JHEP05(2025)074 (Final published version)
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