IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

Abstract: Drawing inspiration from AdS/CFT holography, I will discuss the idea that a static patch in de Sitter space admits a fundamental description based upon standard quantum mechanics. Taking a bottom-up perspective, I compute correlation functions of operators dressed to an observer's worldline in de Sitter. Out-of-time-ordered correlators with long time separations exhibit an ``anti-scrambling'' property that is in tension with finite temperature quantum mechanics. I will also discuss the probability distribution for the observer's mass in the Hartle-Hawking state, which provides a fundamental constraint on the putative quantum dual.