Confinement in de Sitter space and the swampland

We develop a new setting in the framework of braneworld holography to describe a pair of coupled and entangled uniformly accelerated universes. The model consists of two branes embedded into AdS space capping off the UV and IR regions, giving rise to a notion of dS wedge holography. Specializing in a three-dimensional bulk, we show that dS JT gravity can emerge as an effective braneworld theory, provided that fluctuations transverse to the branes are included. We study the holographic entanglement entropy between the branes as well as the holographic complexity within the ‘complexity=anything’ proposal. We reproduce a Page curve with respect to an observer collecting radiation on the UV brane, as long as we take the limit where gravity decouples in that universe, thus acting as a non-gravitating bath. The Page curve emerges due to momentum-space (UV/IR) entanglement and can be understood as analogous to the ‘confinement-deconfinement’ transition in theories with a mass gap. Moreover, the analysis of complexity shows that the hyperfast growth phenomenon is displayed within a set of proposals, while late-time linear growth can be recovered for a different set. Our framework thus provides new test grounds for understanding quantum information concepts in dS space and dS holography.

Section: Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entangled universes in dS wedge holography

Aguilar-Gutierrez,

Patra,

Pedraza

2023

Cosmological phase transitions and the swampland

Venken

2024

I consider the Festina Lente Swampland bound and argue taking thermal effects, as for instance occur during reheating, into account significantly strengthens the implications of this bound. I argue that the confinement scale should be higher than a scale proportional to the vacuum energy, while Festina Lente without thermal effects only bounds the confinement scale to be above the Hubble scale. For Higgsing of nonabelian gauge fields, I find that the magnitude of the Higgs mass should be heavier than a bound proportional to the Electroweak scale (or generally the scale set by the Higgs VEV). The measured values of the Higgs in the SM satisfy the bound. A way to avoid the bound being violated during inflation is to have a large number of species becoming light. If one wants the inflationary scale to lie below the species scale in this case, this bounds the inflationary scale to be ≪ 105 GeV. These bounds have phenomenological implications for BSM physics such as GUTs, suggesting for example a weak or absent gravitational wave signature from the GUT Higgsing phase transition.

Confinement from distance in metric space and its relation to cosmological constant

Mohseni,

Torabian

2024

We argue that, in a theory of quantum gravity, the gauge coupling and the confinement scale of a gauge theory are related to distance in the space of metric configurations, and in turn to the cosmological constant. To support the argument, we compute the gauge kinetic functions in variuos supersymmetric Heterotic and type II string compactifications and show that they depend on distance. According to the swampland program, the distance between two (anti) de Sitter vacua in the space of metric configurations is proportional to the logarithm of the ratio of cosmological constants and thus the confinement scale depends on the value of the cosmological constant. In this framework, for de Sitter space, we revisit the swampland Festina Lente bound and gauge theories in the dark dimension scenario. We show that if the Festina Lente bound is realized in a de Sitter vacuum and dependence on distance is strong enough, it will be realized in vacua with higher cosmological constants. In dark dimension scenario, as the value of cosmological constant is related to the decompactifying dimension, we find that the confinement scale is indeed related to radius of dark dimension. We show that in this scenario the Festina Lente bound holds for the standard model QCD, as well as all confining gauge groups with Nc ≲ 103.