2–6 Sept 2024
University of Southampton
Europe/London timezone

Bra-Ket Wormholes in Cosmology

5 Sept 2024, 14:00
30m
B44/LTA (University of Southampton)

B44/LTA

University of Southampton

Talk in parallel session Parallel sessions

Speaker

Viktor Gorbenko (EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (CH))

Description

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. 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.

Presentation materials