Speaker
Mark Van Raamsdonk
(University of British Columbia)
Description
We describe how the standard tools of holography might be used to define microscopic models of big-bang cosmology. We consider models where a bubble of the cosmological spacetime is embedded in an asymptotically AdS spacetime, and models where an asymptotically AdS Euclidean spacetime obtained by analytically continuing the cosmological spacetime is described via a Euclidean CFT construction. While the effective field theories we consider have negative cosmological constant, they can describe realistic accelerating cosmologies via the positive potential energy of time-dependent scalar fields.
