Defect CFTs and holographic multiverse

Understand

We investigate some aspects of a recent proposal for a holographic description of the multiverse.

• Specifically, we focus on the implications on the suggested duality of the fluctuations of a bubble separating two universes with different cosmological constants.
• We do so by considering a similar problem in a 2+1 CFT with a codimension one defect, obtained by an M5-brane probe embedding in AdS_4x S^7, and studying its spectrum of fluctuations.
• Our results suggest that the kind of behavior required by the spectrum of bubble fluctuations is not likely to take place in defect CFTs with an AdS dual, although it might be possible if the defect supports a non-unitary theory.