DARK ENERGY STARS AND AdS/CFT
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under conract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
The picture of gravitational collapse provided by classical general relativity (GR) cannot be completely correct because it conflicts with ordinary quantum mechanics during the final stages of collapse. As an alternative it has been suggested that the interior spacetime of compact astrophysical objects is a macroscopic quantum state. This assumption implies that during the final stages of the gravitational collapse the baryonic matter of the collapsing object gets converted into vacuum energy. The name “dark energy star“ has been introduced to describe the endpoint of collapse. In 2000 R. Laughlin and the author realized that the surface of a dark energy star corresponds to a quantum critical phase transition of space-time vacuum state analogous to the quantum critical phase transitions that have been observed in many kinds of condensed matter systems at low temperatures [1]. The new picture that emerges for compact astrophysical objects is that there is no singularity in the interior, but the interior vacuum energy is much larger than the cosmological vacuum energy. The time dilation factor for the interior metric is positive, but becomes small as one approaches the surface. The event horizon predicted by GR is replaced by a thin surface layer where one needs new physics.
