Holography, Locality and Symmetries of the Universe
By: Xiao Xiao
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2015
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: It is an interesting question that, with a well tested duality between the quantum gravity in anti de Sitter space and a quantum field theory in one lower dimension, whether quantum gravity in a cosmological background has a well defined dual description. In large 1/N limit, this duality could be a correspondence between an approximately local gravity theory describing cosmology and a quantum field theory. In dS/CFT, the quantum field theory is a Euclidean CFT living at the conformal boundary of de Sitter space, in large N limit, we should expect the local observables in de Sitter cosmology be recovered from the CFT. We explicitly develop this construction for scalar fields and derive the operator map at lowest order of 1/N expansion. Having addressed the fundamental question of how local fields in de Sitter cosmology arise via holography, we focus on the theory of cosmological perturbations that is described in terms of local field theory. The curvature perturbations during inflation, which originated from quantum fluctuations of inflaton and which induced the CMB inhomogeneity we see today, as well as the large scale structure, can be described as Goldstone boson fields which nonlinearly realize a subset of general coordinate transformations as residual symmetries.

This fact puts strong constraints on the behavior of the cosmological correlation functions, and a series of consistency relations constraining the soft limits of these correlation functions can be derived as Ward identities.
Notes: Department: Physics.

Thesis advisor: Erick J. Weinberg.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2015.