title: Holographic signatures of cosmological singularities.
abstract: To gain insight into the quantum nature of cosmological singularities, we study anisotropic Kasner solutions in gauge-gravity duality. The dual description of the bulk evolution towards the singularity involves N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on the expanding branch of deformed de Sitter space and is well defined. We compute two-point correlators of Yang-Mills operators of large dimensions using spacelike geodesics anchored on the boundary. The correlators show a strong signature of the singularity around horizon scales and decay at large boundary separation at different rates in different directions. More generally, the boundary evolution exhibits a process of particle creation similar to that in inflation. This leads us to conjecture that information on the quantum nature of cosmological singularities is encoded in long-wavelength features of the boundary wave function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
authors.forename: Netta
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Engelhardt
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, KU Leuven, 3001 Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hertog
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
authors.forename: Gary T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Horowitz