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Adventures in de Sitter space

Raphael Bousso
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Abstract

This is my contribution to the Festschrift honoring Stephen Hawking on his 60th birthday. Twenty-five years ago, Gibbons and Hawking laid out the semi-classical properties of de Sitter space. After a summary of their main results, I discuss some further quantum aspects that have since been understood. The largest de Sitter black hole displays an intriguing pattern of instabilities, which can render the boundary structure arbitrarily complicated. I review entropy bounds specific to de Sitter space and outline a few of the strategies and problems in the search for a full quantum theory of the spacetime.

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Raphael Bousso. 2002-05-17. Adventures in de Sitter space. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0205177

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