Inflationary Implications of the Covariant Entropy Bound and the Swampland de Sitter Conjectures

We present a proposal to relate the de Sitter conjecture (dSC) with the time dependence of fluxes via the covariant entropy bound (CEB). By assuming an early phase of accelerated expansion where the CEB is satisfied, we take into account a contribution from time-dependent flux compactification to the four-dimensional entropy which establishes a bound on the usual slow-roll parameters ηH and ϵH. We also show an explicit calculation of entropy from a toroidal flux compactification, from a transition amplitude of time-dependent fluxes which allows us to determine the conditions on which the bounds on the slow-roll parameters are in agreement to the dSC.

Gravitational and gravitoscalar thermodynamics

Gravitational thermodynamics and gravitoscalar thermodynamics with S2 × ℝ boundary geometry are investigated through the partition function, assuming that all Euclidean saddle point geometries contribute to the path integral and dominant ones are in the B3 × S1 or S2 × Disc topology sector. In the first part, I concentrate on the purely gravitational case with or without a cosmological constant and show there exists a new type of saddle point geometry, which I call the “bag of gold(BG) instanton,” only for the Λ > 0 case. Because of this existence, thermodynamical stability of the system and the entropy bound are absent for Λ > 0, these being universal properties for Λ ≤ 0. In the second part, I investigate the thermodynamical properties of a gravity-scalar system with a φ2 potential. I show that when Λ ≤ 0 and the boundary value of scalar field Jφ is below some value, then the entropy bound and thermodynamical stability do exist. When either condition on the parameters does not hold, however, thermodynamical stability is (partially) broken. The properties of the system and the relation between BG instantons and the breakdown are discussed in detail.

Contracting cosmologies and the swampland

We consider the cosmology obtained using scalar fields with a negative potential energy, such as employed to obtain an Ekpyrotic phase of contraction. Applying the covariant entropy bound to the tower of states dictated by the distance conjecture, we find that the relative slope of the potential |V′|/|V| is bounded from below by a constant of the order one in Planck units. This is consistent with the requirement to obtain slow Ekpyrotic contraction. We also derive a refined condition on the potential which holds near local minima of a negative potential.

Fermionic criticality is shaped by Fermi surface topology: a case study of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid

We perform a unitary renormalization group (URG) study of the 1D fermionic Hubbard model. The formalism generates a family of effective Hamiltonians and many-body eigenstates arranged holographically across the tensor network from UV to IR. The URG is realized as a quantum circuit, leading to the entanglement holographic mapping (EHM) tensor network description. A topological Θ-term of the projected Hilbert space of the degrees of freedom at the Fermi surface are shown to govern the nature of RG flow towards either the gapless Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid or gapped quantum liquid phases. This results in a nonperturbative version of the Berezenskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) RG phase diagram, revealing a line of intermediate coupling stable fixed points, while the nature of RG flow around the critical point is identical to that obtained from the weak-coupling RG analysis. This coincides with a phase transition in the many-particle entanglement, as the entanglement entropy RG flow shows distinct features for the critical and gapped phases depending on the value of the topological Θ-term. We demonstrate the Ryu-Takyanagi entropy bound for the many-body eigenstates comprising the EHM network, concretizing the relation to the holographic duality principle. The scaling of the entropy bound also distinguishes the gapped and gapless phases, implying the generation of very different holographic spacetimes across the critical point. Finally, we treat the Fermi surface as a quantum impurity coupled to the high energy electronic states. A thought-experiment is devised in order to study entanglement entropy generated by isolating the impurity, and propose ways by which to measure it by studying the quantum noise and higher order cumulants of the full counting statistics.

D-bound and the Bekenstein bound for the surrounded Vaidya black hole

We study the Vaidya black hole surrounded by the exotic quintessence-like, phantom-like and cosmological constant-like fields by means of entropic considerations. Explicitly, we show that for this thermodynamical system, the requirement of the identification of the D-bound and Bekenstein entropy bound can be considered as a thermodynamical criterion by which one can rule out the quintessence-like and phantom-like fields, and prefer the cosmological constant as a viable cosmological field.

ASYMPTOTIC ANALYSIS OF PERES’ ALGORITHM FOR RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION

von Neumann [(1951). Various techniques used in connection with random digits. National Bureau of Standards Applied Math Series 12: 36–38] introduced a simple algorithm for generating independent unbiased random bits by tossing a (possibly) biased coin with unknown bias. While his algorithm fails to attain the entropy bound, Peres [(1992). Iterating von Neumann's procedure for extracting random bits. The Annals of Statistics 20(1): 590–597] showed that the entropy bound can be attained asymptotically by iterating von Neumann's algorithm. Let $b(n,p)$ denote the expected number of unbiased bits generated when Peres’ algorithm is applied to an input sequence consisting of the outcomes of $n$ tosses of the coin with bias $p$ . With $p=1/2$ , the coin is unbiased and the input sequence consists of $n$ unbiased bits, so that $n-b(n,1/2)$ may be referred to as the cost incurred by Peres’ algorithm when not knowing $p=1/2$ . We show that $\lim _{n\to \infty }\log [n-b(n,1/2)]/\log n =\theta =\log [(1+\sqrt {5})/2]$ (where $\log$ is the logarithm to base $2$ ), which together with limited numerical results suggests that $n-b(n,1/2)$ may be a regularly varying sequence of index $\theta$ . (A positive sequence $\{L(n)\}$ is said to be regularly varying of index $\theta$ if $\lim _{n\to \infty }L(\lfloor \lambda n\rfloor )/L(n)=\lambda ^\theta$ for all $\lambda > 0$ , where $\lfloor x\rfloor$ denotes the largest integer not exceeding $x$ .) Some open problems on the asymptotic behavior of $nh(p)-b(n,p)$ are briefly discussed where $h(p)=-p\log p- (1-p)\log (1-p)$ denotes the Shannon entropy of a random bit with bias $p$ .