Quantum compositeness of gravity: black holes, AdS and inflation

Dvali, Gia and Gomez, Cesar (2014): Quantum compositeness of gravity: black holes, AdS and inflation. In: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, No. 1, 023

Abstract

Gravitational backgrounds, such as black holes, AdS, de Sitter and inflationary universes, should be viewed as composite of N soft constituent gravitons. It then follows that such systems are close to quantum criticality of graviton Bose-gas to Bose-liquid transition. Generic properties of the ordinary metric description, including geodesic motion or particle-creation in the background metric, emerge as the large-N limit of quantum scattering of constituent longitudinal gravitons. We show that this picture correctly accounts for physics of large and small black holes in AdS, as well as reproduces well-known inflationary predictions for cosmological parameters. However, it anticipates new effects not captured by the standard semi-classical treatment. In particular, we predict observable corrections that are sensitive to the inflationary history way beyond last 60 e-foldings. We derive an absolute upper bound on the number of e-foldings, beyond which neither de Sitter nor inflationary Universe can be approximated by a semi-classical metric. However, they could in principle persist in a new type of quantum eternity state. We discuss implications of this phenomenon for the cosmological constant problem.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Keywords: inflation; gravity; cosmological perturbation theory; dark energy theory
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• ISSN: 1475-7516
• Language: English