Holography for a Non-Inflationary Early Universe

Understand

We construct a gravitational dual of the pseudo-conformal universe, a proposed alternative to inflation in which a conformal field theory in nearly flat space develops a time dependent vacuum expectation value.

• Constructing this dual amounts to finding five-dimensional domain-wall spacetimes with anti-de Sitter asymptotics, for which the wall has the symmetries of four-dimensional de Sitter space.
• This holographically realizes the characteristic symmetry breaking pattern O(2,4) to O(1,4) of the pseudo-conformal universe.
• We present an explicit example with a massless scalar field, using holographic renormalization to obtain general expressions for the renormalized scalar and stress-tensor one-point functions.