Holography and Cosmological Singularities

Abstract

Certain null singularities in ten dimensional supergravity have natural holographic duals in terms of Matrix Theory and generalizations of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In many situations the holographic duals appear to be well defined in regions where the supergravity develops singularities. We describe some recent progress in this area.

Light-like big bang singularities in string and matrix theories

“…(Note the similarities of this setting to the AdS light-like cosmologies reviewed in [25]. There, one ends up with a gauge theory featuring singular light-like time dependences.…”

“…If we now apply (25) and (23) to evaluateỸ at a large positive η = t 2 /ǫ, the powers of ǫ in C 1 and C 2 will combine with the powers of ǫ originating from Y 1+ and Y 2+ and yield…”

“…Similar non-linearities characteristic of gauge theories are present in both cases. In [25], a special class of plane waves is chosen for which the analysis simplifies due to conformal flatness. General p-brane-plane-wave solutions presented in [51] suggest a natural generalization of AdS light-like cosmologies featuring arbitrary plane wave profiles.…”

“…Within the class of light-like singularities, we will focus on studies in perturbative string theory and matrix (string) theory. For studies of light-like singularities using the AdS/CFT correspondence, see the review [25].…”

Domain walls, triples and acceleration

“…Later examples are of the matrix big bang flavor [49][50][51][52][53][54] for which the space-time cosmology involves null-time-dependence, but the matrix model involves a field theory with time-dependent parameters. Field theories with spacetime-dependent parameters exhibit interesting phenomena not seen in their Lorentz invariant counterparts; see, for example [55][56][57][58].…”