Selected Honorable Mention EssayNo Access

Baby universes born from the void

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada

E-mail Address: pbetzios@phas.ubc.ca

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Nava Gaddam

Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, 3508 TD Utrecht, The Netherlands

E-mail Address: gaddam@uu.nl

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, and

Olga Papadoulaki

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5, Canada

E-mail Address: opapadoulaki@perimeterinstitute.ca

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218271822420214Cited by:3 (Source: Crossref)

This article is part of the issue:

SPECIAL ISSUE: Selected Essays from the Annual Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation 2022
Editor: D. V. Ahluwalia

Abstract

We propose a novel construction of a third quantised baby universe Hilbert space $ℋ_{BU}$ for the quantum gravity path integral. In contrast to the original description of $α$ -parameters, both the bulk and boundary microscopic parameters are fixed in our proposal. Wormholes and baby universes appear due to refined observables, of the boundary dual quantum field theories, that crucially involve the space of representations of the boundary gauge group. Irreducible representations, on which the path integral factorises, give rise to field theoretic superselection sectors and replace the $α$ states.

This essay received an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.

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