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Gravitational effective theories associated with holographic CFTs have cosmological solutions, which are typically big-bang / big-crunch cosmologies. These solutions are not asymptotically AdS, so they are not dual to finite-energy states of the CFT. However, we can find solutions with arbitrarily large spherical bubbles of such cosmologies embedded in asymptotically AdS spacetimes where the exterior of the bubble is Schwarzschild-AdS. In this paper, we explore such solutions and their possible CFT dual descriptions. Starting with a cosmological solution with $\Lambda < 0$ plus arbitrary matter density, radiation density, and spatial curvature, we show that a comoving bubble of arbitrary size can be embedded in a geometry with AdS-Schwarzschild exterior across a thin-shell domain wall comprised of pressureless matter. We show that in most cases (in particular, for arbitrarily large bubbles with an arbitrarily small negative spatial curvature) the entropy of the black hole exceeds the (radiation) entropy in the cosmological bubble, suggesting that a faithful CFT description is possible. We show that unlike the case of a de Sitter bubble, the Euclidean continuation of these cosmological solutions is sensible and suggests a specific construction of CFT states dual to the cosmological solutions via Euclidean path integral., Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures

A large class of $\Lambda < 0$ cosmologies have big-bang / big crunch spacetimes with time-symmetric backgrounds and asymptotically AdS Euclidean continuations suggesting a possible holographic realization. We argue that these models generically have time-dependent scalar fields, and these can lead to realistic cosmologies at the level of the homogeneous background geometry, with an accelerating phase prior to the turnaround and crunch. We first demonstrate via explicit effective field theory examples that models with an asymptotically AdS Euclidean continuation can also exhibit a period of accelerated expansion without fine tuning. We then show that certain significantly more tuned examples can give predictions arbitrarily close to a $\Lambda$CDM model. Finally, we demonstrate via an explicit construction that the potentials of interest can arise from a superpotential, thus suggesting that these solutions may be compatible with an underlying supersymmetric theory., Comment: 26 pages + appendices. v2: corrected affiliations, added references

In this companion to our letter (arXiv:2208.10514), we elaborate the full details of the predicted corrections to the primordial scalar and tensor power spectra that arise from quantum gravity-motivated, natural, covariant ultraviolet cutoffs. We implement these cutoffs by covariantly restricting the fields which are summed over in the path integrals for the primordial correlators, and we discuss in detail the functional analytic techniques necessary for evaluating such path integrals. Our prediction, which is given in terms of measured cosmological parameters and without assuming any particular inflationary potential, is that the corrections take the form of small oscillations which are superimposed on the conventional power spectra. The frequency of these oscillations only depends on the location of the cutoff scale and the first inflationary slow-roll parameter, while the amplitude and phase are also moderately sensitive to how smoothly the cutoff turns on. The specificity of the new predictions offers an opportunity to significantly enhance experimental sensitivity in observations of the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure. This may be used to place ever higher bounds on the scale at which quantum gravity effects become important in quantum field theory or may even provide positive evidence for quantum gravity effects., Comment: 28+26 pages, 10 figures. v2: small tweaks, added references. v3: revised certain calculations and significantly improved predictions, discussion of observational prospects

We compute the corrections to the primordial power spectrum that should arise in realistic inflationary scenarios if there exists a generic covariant ultraviolet (UV) cutoff, as commonly motivated by considerations of quantum gravity. The corrections to the spectrum consist of small superimposed oscillations whose frequency, phase, and amplitude are functions of the comoving wave number. For any given cosmological parameters that characterize the slow roll during inflation, the frequency predicted for these oscillations depends only on the value of the UV cutoff. The specificity of this prediction can be used to increase experimental sensitivity through the filtering for template signatures. This will allow experiments to put new bounds on where a natural UV cutoff can be located between the Planck scale and the Hubble scale during inflation. It may even bring imprints of Planck-scale physics in the cosmic microwave background and in structure formation within the range of observations., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. v2: small tweaks, more references added. v3: significantly revised certain calculations and expanded/improved predictions and discussion of observational outlook

A large class of flat big bang - big crunch cosmologies with negative cosmological constant are related by analytic continuation to asymptotically AdS traversable wormholes with planar cross section. In recent works (arXiv: 2102.05057, 2203.11220) it was suggested that such wormhole geometries may be dual to a pair of 3D holographic CFTs coupled via auxiliary degrees of freedom to give a theory that confines in the infrared. In this paper, we explore signatures of the presence of such a wormhole in the state of the coupled pair of 3D theories. We explain how the wormhole geometry is reflected in the spectrum of the confining theory and the behavior of two-point functions and entanglement entropies. We provide explicit algorithms to reconstruct the wormhole scale factor (which uniquely determines its geometry) from entanglement entropies, heavy operator two-point functions, or light operator two-point functions (which contain the spectrum information). In the last case, the physics of the bulk scalar field dual to the light operator is closely related to the quantum mechanics of a one-dimensional particle in a potential derived from the scale factor, and the problem of reconstructing the scale factor from the two-point function is directly related to the problem of reconstructing this Schr\"odinger potential from its spectrum., Comment: 37 Pages + appendices, 4 Figures

We consider cosmological models in which the cosmology is related via analytic continuation to a Euclidean asymptotically AdS planar wormhole geometry defined holographically via a pair of three-dimensional Euclidean CFTs. We argue that these models can generically give rise to an accelerating phase for the cosmology due to the potential energy of scalar fields associated with relevant scalar operators in the CFT. We explain how cosmological observables are related to observables in the wormhole spacetime and argue that this leads to a novel perspective on naturalness puzzles in cosmology., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Updated to match published version

We argue that standard tools of holography can be used to describe fully non-perturbative microscopic models of cosmology in which a period of accelerated expansion may result from the positive potential energy of time-dependent scalar fields evolving towards a region with negative potential. In these models, the fundamental cosmological constant is negative, and the universe eventually recollapses in a time-reversal symmetric way. The microscopic description naturally selects a special state for the cosmology. In this framework, physics in the cosmological spacetime is dual to the vacuum physics in a static planar asymptotically AdS Lorentzian wormhole spacetime, in the sense that the background spacetimes and observables are related by analytic continuation. The dual spacetime is weakly curved everywhere, so any cosmological observables can be computed in the dual picture via effective field theory without detailed knowledge of the UV completion or the physics near the big bang. In particular, while inflation may explain the origin of perturbations in the cosmology picture, the perturbations can be deduced from the dual picture without any knowledge of the inflationary potential., Comment: 58 pages, LaTeX, 8 figures

When does a holographic CFT with a boundary added to it (a BCFT) also have a `good' holographic dual with a localized gravitating end-of-the-world brane? We argue that the answer to this question is almost never. By studying Lorentzian BCFT correlators, we characterize constraints imposed on a BCFT by the existence of a bulk causal structure. We argue that approximate `bulk brane' singularities place restrictive constraints on the spectrum of a BCFT that are not expected to be true generically. We discuss how similar constraints implied by bulk causality might apply in higher-dimensional holographic descriptions of BCFTs involving a degenerating internal space. We suggest (although do not prove) that even these higher-dimensional holographic duals are not generic., Comment: Minor edits to v1 (comments and citations added in footnotes); acknowledgments added

Using a holographic model, we study quantum field theories with a layer of one CFT surrounded by another CFT, on either a periodic or an infinite direction. We study the vacuum energy density in each CFT as a function of the central charges, the thickness of the layer(s), and the properties of the interfaces between the CFTs. The dual spacetimes in the holographic model include two regions separated by a dynamical interface with some tension. For two or more spatial dimensions, we find that a layer of CFT with more degrees of freedom than the surrounding one can have an anomalously large negative vacuum energy density for certain types of interfaces. The negative energy density (or null-energy density in the direction perpendicular to the interface) becomes arbitrarily large for fixed layer width when the tension of the bulk interface approaches a lower critical value. We argue that in cases where we have large negative energy density, we also have an anomalously high transition temperature to the high-temperature thermal state., Comment: 1+27 pages, 10 figures, minor comments added to discussion in this version

We argue that given holographic CFT$_1$ in some state with a dual spacetime geometry M, and given some other holographic CFT$_2$, we can find states of CFT$_2$ whose dual geometries closely approximate arbitrarily large causal patches of M, provided that CFT$_1$ and CFT$_2$ can be non-trivially coupled at an interface. Our CFT$_2$ states are "dressed up as" states of CFT$_1$: they are obtained from the original CFT$_1$ state by a regularized quench operator defined using a Euclidean path-integral with an interface CFT$_1$ CFT$_2$ and CFT$_1$. Our results are consistent with the idea that the precise microscopic degrees of freedom and Hamiltonian of a holographic CFT are only important in fixing the asymptotic behavior of a dual spacetime, while the interior spacetime of a region spacelike separated from a boundary time slice is determined by more universal properties (such as entanglement structure) of the quantum state at this time slice. Our picture requires that low-energy gravitational theories related to CFTs that can be non-trivially coupled at an interface are part of the same non-perturbative theory of quantum gravity., Comment: 45 pages, 15 figures. v2: references and figure added. Talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHA6oFi3QHo

This paper has two messages. First, we demonstrate that neural networks that process noisy data can learn to exploit, when available, access to auxiliary noise that is correlated with the noise on the data. In effect, the network learns to use the correlated auxiliary noise as an approximate key to decipher its noisy input data. Second, we show that, for this task, the scaling behavior with increasing noise is such that future quantum machines could possess an advantage. In particular, decoherence generates correlated auxiliary noise in the environment. The new approach could, therefore, help enable future quantum machines by providing machine-learned quantum error correction., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures

Given that any communication is communication through quantum fields, we here study the scenario where a sender, Alice, causes information-carrying disturbances in a quantum field. We track the exact spread of these disturbances in space and time by using the technique of quantum information capsules (QIC). We find that the channel capacity between Alice and a receiver, Bob, is enhanced by Bob placing detectors not only inside but in addition also outside the causal future of Alice's encoding operation. Intuitively, this type of superadditivity arises because the field outside the causal future of Alice is entangled with the field inside Alice's causal future. Hence, the quantum noise picked up by Bob's detectors outside Alice's causal future is correlated with the noise of Bob's detectors inside Alice's causal future. In effect, this correlation allows Bob to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of those of his detectors which are in the causal future of Alice. Further, we develop the multimode generalization of the QIC technique. This allows us to extend the analysis to the case where Alice operates multiple localized and optionally entangled emitters. We apply the new techniques to the case where Alice enhances the channel capacity by operating multiple emitters that are suitably lined up and pre-timed to generate a quantum shockwave in the field., Comment: 22 pages, 49 figures. Typos have been fixed

We investigate the quantum channel consisting of two localized quantum systems that communicate through a scalar quantum field. We choose a scalar field rather than a tensor or vector field, such as the electromagnetic field, in order to isolate the situation where the qubits are carried by the field amplitudes themselves rather than, for example, by encoding qubits in the polarization of photons. We find that suitable protocols for this type of quantum channel require the careful navigation of several constraints, such as the no-cloning principle, the strong Huygens principle and the tendency of short field-matter couplings to be entanglement breaking. We non-perturbatively construct a protocol for such a quantum channel that possesses maximal quantum capacity., Comment: Minor typos and a couple of references are fixed

We calculate the gravitational wave power density emitted by quantum thermal sources. As particular cases, we calculate the emission of gravitational waves from the cosmic microwave background and from stellar sources. We study how treating gravity classically affects the prediction of the thermal emission. We find that the predicted emitted gravitational wave radiation does not exhibit an ultraviolet divergence, even if gravity is treated classically, as long as the fields describing the thermal source are quantum mechanical., Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure; RevTeX 4.1. v2: Minor changes to match published version (including title change)

We study the harvesting of entanglement and mutual information by Unruh-DeWitt particle detectors from thermal and squeezed coherent field states. We prove (for arbitrary spatial dimensions, switching profiles and detector smearings) that while the entanglement harvesting ability of detectors decreases monotonically with the field temperature $T$, harvested mutual information grows linearly with $T$. We also show that entanglement harvesting from a general squeezed coherent state is independent of the coherent amplitude, but depends strongly on the squeezing amplitude. Moreover, we find that highly squeezed states i) allow for detectors to harvest much more entanglement than from the vacuum, and ii) ensure that the entanglement harvested does not decay with their spatial separation. Finally we analyze the spatial inhomogeneity of squeezed states and its influence on harvesting, and investigate how much entanglement one can actually extract from squeezed states when the squeezing is bandlimited., Comment: RevTeX4.1. 16 pages, 6 figures

We study under what circumstances a separable bipartite system A-B can or cannot become entangled through local interactions with a bi-local entangled source $\text{S}_1$-$\text{S}_2$. We obtain constraints on the general forms of the interaction Hamiltonians coupling A with $\text{S}_1$ and B with $\text{S}_2$ necessary for A and B to become entangled. We are able to generalize and provide non-perturbative insight on several previous no-go theorems of entanglement harvesting from quantum fields using these general results. We also discuss the role of communication in the process of entanglement extraction, establishing a distinction between genuine entanglement extraction and communication-assisted entanglement generation., Comment: 16 pages, 5 Figures, two appendices. RevTeX 4.1. Minor typos fixed

We study (non-perturbatively) the interactions of delta-coupled detectors with coherent states of a scalar field. We show that the time-evolved density matrix spectra of i) a single detector, ii) two detectors, and iii) the partial transpose of the latter, are all independent of which coherent state the field was in. Furthermore, we find that the eigenvalues in iii) are non-negative, implying that a delta-coupled detector pair cannot harvest entanglement from the vacuum, or any other coherent field state., Comment: 20 pages. RevTeX 4.1

We analyze the interactions of particle detectors with coherent states of a free scalar field. We find that the eigenvalues of the post-interaction density matrices of i) a single detector, ii) two detectors, and iii) the partial transpose of the latter, are all independent of which coherent state the field was in. A consequence of these results is that a detector pair can harvest the same amount of entanglement from any coherent field state as from the vacuum., Comment: 11 pages. RevTeX 4.1. Updated to fix minor typos

We analyze the exchange of information in different cosmological backgrounds when sender and receiver are timelike separated and communicate through massless fields (without the exchange of light-signals). Remarkably, we show that the dominance of a cosmological constant makes the amount of recoverable information imprinted in the field by the sender extremely resilient: it does not decay in time or with the spatial separation of sender and receiver, and it actually increases with the rate of expansion of the Universe. This is in stark contrast with the information carried by conventional light-signals and with previous results on timelike communication through massless fields in matter dominated cosmologies., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. RevTeX 4.1. v2: Minor typos corrected and updated to match published version (including minor title change)