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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Quantum dynamics of cosmological particle production: interacting quantum field theories with matrix product states

Understanding real-time dynamics of interacting quantum fields in curved space-time remains a major theoretical challenge. We employ tensor network methods to study such dynamics using interacting scalar and gauge theories in 1+1 spacetime dimensions, subject to a quench modeling a homogeneously expanding gravitational background. The models considered are the scalar λϕ 4 theory and the Schwinger model, i.e. a Dirac fermion coupled to a U(1) gauge field which is equivalent via bosonization to a scalar field with a cosine self-interaction. In the free scalar limit, both theories reproduce known analytical results, providing a nontrivial numerical validation of bosonization in curved spacetime for the Schwinger model. Our central finding is that self-interactions lead to a suppression of gravitational particle production compared to the free-field case, as evidenced by two-point functions and the spectra of produced particles. We further examine the behavior of entanglement generation and find that interactions suppress entanglement growth in the λϕ 4 theory, while in the Schwinger model, the interplay between suppressed particle production and enhanced inter-particle correlations leads to more complex entanglement behavior. Our results pave the way for further explorations of nonperturbative quantum real-time dynamics of interacting scalar and gauge theories in arbitrary gravitational backgrounds.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Final Report for Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of New Hampshire

This award supported the research activities three faculty in the University of New Hampshire Department of Physics and Astronomy: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (PI), Dr. Per Berglund (Co-I), and Dr. David Mattingly (Co-I). These research activities broadly spanned areas of high energy physics that included dark matter cosmology, quantum gravity, and string theory.

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda [University of New Hamps↗
DOE OSTI2025

Redshifting the Cosmological Constant in Unimodular Gravity via Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics

The cosmological constant problem represents a profound conflict between quantum field theory and general relativity. Unimodular gravity offers a compelling starting point by de-gravitating the vacuum energy of the Standard Model, but this framework traditionally trades the problem of vacuum energy for a fine-tuning of initial conditions, which manifest as a ``shadow" cosmological constant. In this paper, we resolve this initial conditions problem by proposing a novel modification to gravity based on nonlinear quantum mechanics. We introduce specific state-dependent terms to the Hamiltonian, constructed from expectation values of the metric such as the average Ricci scalar. These terms alter the dynamical equations of gravity such that the shadow energy density associated with unconstrained initial conditions redshifts away with cosmic expansion, rendering it negligible at late times. The resulting cosmology is naturally dominated by matter and radiation without fine-tuning. We demonstrate that this significant infrared modification of gravity is consistent with local and cosmological tests of gravity. We comment on the possibility of testing this solution in cosmological measurements of Newton's constant.

Kaplan, David E. [Johns Hopkins U.; Tokyo U., IPMU↗
DOE OSTI2025

Evolving Dark Sector and the Dark Dimension Scenario

String theory naturally leads to the expectation that dark energy is not stable, and may be evolving as captured by the Swampland de Sitter conjectures. Moreover, motivated by the distance conjecture, a unification of dark sector has been proposed, where the smallness of dark energy leads to one extra dimension of micron size with dark matter being the Kaluza--Klein graviton excitations in this extra dimension. We consider the natural possibility that the radius of the dark dimension varies as the dark energy decreases, leading to the variation of the dark matter mass. This correlates the decrease of the dark energy with the variation of the dark matter mass as they depend on the variations of a scalar field $ϕ$ controlling the radius of the extra dimension. A simple realization of this idea for small range of $ϕ$ is adequately captured by choosing a potential which is locally of the form $V=V_0\ {\rm exp}(-cϕ)$ and dark matter mass $m_{\rm DM}=m_0\ {\rm exp}(-c' ϕ)$ where the sign of $ϕ$ is chosen such that $c'\geq 0$ while we have two choices for the sign of $c$ depending on whether the dark dimension expands or shrinks when the dark energy dominates. We find excellent agreement with recent experimental data from DESI DR2 combined with SN measurements (from DES, Union3 or Pantheon+) and reproduces the same significance as CPL parametrization with the added benefit of providing a natural explanation for the apparent phantom behavior ($w<-1$) reported by DESI and DES based on a physical model. DESI and SN datasets independently favor non-zero values of $c'$ and $c$, respectively, both lying within the expected $\mathcal{O}(1)$ range suggested by the Swampland criteria. Moreover, our best fit value $c'\simeq 0.05 \pm 0.01$ is remarkably consistent with the experimental upper bound of $c'\lesssim 0.2$ demanded by the lack of detection of fifth force in the dark sector.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.C↗
DOE OSTI2025

The Baby Universe is Fine and the CFT Knows It: On Holography for Closed Universes

Big bang/big crunch closed universes can be realized in AdS/CFT, even though they lack asymptotically AdS boundaries. With enough bulk entanglement, the bulk Hilbert space of a closed universe can be holographically encoded in the CFT. We clarify the relation of this encoding to observer-clone proposals and refute recent arguments about the breakdown of semiclassical physics in such spaces. In the limit of no bulk entanglement, the holographic encoding breaks down. The oft-cited one-dimensional nature of the closed universe Hilbert space represents the limitation of the external (CFT) Hilbert space to access the quantum information in the closed universe, similar to the limitations imposed on observers outside a perfectly isolated quantum lab. We advocate that the CFT nevertheless continues to determine the physical properties of the closed universe in this regime, showing how to interpret this relationship in terms of a final state projection in the closed universe. We provide a dictionary between the final state wavefunction and CFT data. We propose a model of the emergence of an arrow of time in the universe with a given initial or final state projection. Finally, we show that the conventional EFT in the closed universe, without any projection, can be recovered as a maximally ignorant description of the final state. This conventional EFT is encoded in CFT data, and it can be probed by computing coarse-grained observables. We provide an example of one such observable. Taken together, these results amount to a clean bill of health for baby universes born of AdS/CFT.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

A Black Hole Airy Tail

In Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity, which is dual to a random matrix ensemble, the annealed entropy differs from the quenched entropy at low temperatures and goes negative. However, computing the quenched entropy in JT gravity requires a replica limit that is poorly understood. To circumvent this, we define an intermediate quantity called the semi-quenched entropy, which has the positivity properties of the quenched entropy, while requiring a much simpler replica trick. We compute this in JT gravity in different regimes using i) a bulk calculation involving wormholes corresponding to the Airy limit of the dual matrix integral and ii) a boundary calculation involving one-eigenvalue instanton saddles proposed by Hernández-Cuenca, demonstrating consistency between these two calculations in their common regime of validity. We also clarify why similar one-eigenvalue instanton saddles cannot be used to compute the quenched entropy due to a breakdown of the saddle-point approximation for the one-eigenvalue instanton in the replica limit. Our results show how to use the gravitational path integral to prove that black holes in JT gravity have isolated ground states and to study their properties.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Instant Folded Strings, Dark Energy and a Cyclic Bouncing Universe

We present a wholly self-consistent, complete cyclic bouncing cosmology based on components drawn from string theory and constructed in a way that is under perturbative control throughout (e.g., with temperature much less than the string scale and string coupling $g_s \ll 1$ at all times). The cyclic evolution is governed by standard dilaton-gravity in $(3+1)$-dimensions with a perturbatively generated potential and a coupling between the dilaton and a second field that becomes massless at $ϕ= ϕ_{ESP}$, resulting in an enhanced symmetry point (ESP) that prevents the dilaton from running all the way to zero coupling. A central role is played by instant folded strings (IFSs) - fundamental strings with the unusual property of being much lighter than the string mass while extending far beyond the string length, and violating the Null Energy Condition (NEC). IFSs are produced classically when the string coupling grows with time, which occurs at two critical points in each cycle. In turn, they fulfill a dual function: enabling cosmological bounces and initiating transient epochs of dark-energy domination that naturally transition into slow contraction. The resulting cosmology eliminates the cosmic singularity and multiverse problems of big bang inflationary models and robustly predicts time-varying IFS-induced dark energy and the absence of primordial B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.C↗
DOE OSTI2025

Living on the edge: a non-perturbative resolution to the negativity of bulk entropies

Lin, Maldacena, Rozenberg, and Shan (LMRS) presented a new information paradox in black hole physics by noticing that the entanglement and Rényi entropies in a two-sided black hole can become negative when the geometry contains a very large number of matter excitations behind the black hole horizon. While originally this puzzle was presented in the context of BPS two-sided black holes in two-dimensional supergravity, the negativity in fact persists for more general two-sided black holes in the presence of a large number of matter excitations. Since the entanglement and Rényi entropies in ordinary quantum systems cannot be negative, resolving this puzzle is a necessary step towards understanding the quantum mechanical description of black holes. In this paper, we explain how to address the entanglement negativity puzzle, both in the original setting discussed by LMRS and in more general non-supersymmetric settings, by summing over all non-perturbative contributions to the gravitational path integral. We then interpret this result from the point of view of a dual matrix integral, which we use to extend our analysis beyond the regime of validity of the genus re-summation performed in the gravitational path integral. In this regime, positivity is rescued by new saddles of the matrix integral, a one-eigenvalue instanton and a two-eigenvalue instanton. Finally, we formulate a similar puzzle and its resolution using random tensor network techniques.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Holographic Constraints on the String Landscape

We show that holography imposes strong and general constraints on scalar field potentials in the string landscape, determined by the asymptotic structure of the underlying spacetime. Applying these holographic consistency conditions, we identify broad classes of scalar potentials that are incompatible with a well-defined dual description. These include potentials with extended plateaus, excessively steep or shallow asymptotics, certain zero crossings, and specific alignments of stable AdS minima in moduli space. In particular, making the standard assumption that the CFT dual to a stable AdS vacuum must be realized as a worldvolume theory of a brane in string theory, we show that the brane selects an infinite-distance limit in moduli space where parametric scale separation is forbidden. Furthermore, the steepness and positivity of the potential are restricted in that infinite distance direction. We also find that requiring the validity of the effective theory in the future vacuum, a natural holographic criterion, automatically enforces the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for classical cosmological solutions with positive potentials. Taken together, these constraints exclude the leading proposals to realize scale-separated AdS vacua and metastable de Sitter vacua in the string theory landscape such as DGKT and KKLT.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.C↗
DOE OSTI2025

Particle Production by Time-Varying Dark Energy and the End of Cosmic Expansion

We consider various possible consequences of time-varying dark energy due to a quintessence scalar field whose energy density is partially converted to particles as the field evolves down its potential. This particle production acts as a source of thermal friction on the field that can make it difficult to distinguish whether dark energy is due to a radiating field rolling down a steep potential, a purely self-interacting field moving down a flatter potential, or a cosmological constant. By reducing the acceleration of the scalar field, thermal friction increases the amount of accelerated expansion and can cause a sizable bump in the quintessence equation of state. We take special interest in the case where a steep potential rapidly changes from positive to negative as the field evolves, resulting in the end of cosmic expansion and the beginning of contraction. Even in this case, we find that thermal friction lengthens the period of accelerated expansion and consequently delays the end of cosmic expansion, making it challenging to detect the impending transition to contraction using conventional cosmological tests. However, particle production can also provide alternative avenues for detection by generating a background of thermal dark radiation, partly comprised of neutrinos or other particles, whose energy density exceeds the remnant photon energy density.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.C↗
DOE OSTI2025

Diagonal Approximation for Holographic Rényi Entropies

Recently, Dong et al., [A modified cosmic brane proposal for holographic Renyi entropy, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2024) 120] proposed a modified cosmic brane prescription for computing the Rényi entropy 𝑆𝛼 of a holographic system in the presence of multiple extremal surfaces. This prescription was found by assuming a diagonal approximation, where the Rényi entropy is computed after first measuring the areas of all extremal surfaces. We derive this diagonal approximation for the case of two extremal surfaces and show that it accurately computes Rényi entropies up to 𝑂⁡(log⁡𝐺) corrections. For 𝛼 <1, this allows us to derive the modified cosmic brane prescription, which differs from the original cosmic brane prescription at leading order in 𝐺. For 𝛼 >1, it leads to the original cosmic brane prescription without needing to assume that replica symmetry is unbroken in the bulk.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Kinematic flow from the flow of cuts

The wavefunction coefficients of conformally coupled scalars in power-law FRW cosmologies satisfy differential equations governed by a set of simple combinatorial rules known as the kinematic flow. In this paper we derive the kinematic flow, expressed using a set of differential forms referred to as the cut basis, from a geometric perspective, relying solely on the cosmological hyperplane arrangement and without invoking bulk physics. Each element of the cut basis corresponds to the positive geometry associated to an independent cut of the physical FRW-form and can be labeled by decorating (minors of) the truncated Feynman graph with an acyclic orientation. We provide a straightforward prescription to associate a logarithmic differential form to each element of the cut basis by considering its corresponding decorated graph. Moreover, we show that the residues of the physical FRW-form are canonical forms of certain graphical zonotopes labeled by the same set of decorated graphs. These zonotopes control the cut combinatorics -- flow of cuts -- of the physical FRW-form and the cut basis (by construction). Using the theory of relative twisted cohomology and intersection theory, we derive a closed form formula for the differential equations of the cut basis. We also introduce combinatorial rules that compute the kinematic differential of any basis element without explicit calculation. The combinatorics of our differential equations is a natural consequence of the flow of cuts and is equivalent (up to rescaling) to the kinematic flow for the recently studied time integral basis. In particular, our differential equations decouple into exponentially many sectors, one for each way of cutting a subset of edges of the graph.

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology↗
DOE OSTI2025

Simple holography in general spacetimes

The simple or “outermost” wedge in AdS is the portion of the entanglement wedge that can be reconstructed with sub-exponential effort from CFT data. Here we furnish a definition in arbitrary spacetimes: given an input wedge a analogous to a CFT boundary region, the simple wedge z(a) is the largest wedge accessible by a “zigzag,” a certain sequence of antinormal lightsheets. We show that z(a) is a throat, and that it is contained in every other throat. This implies that z(a) is unique; that it is contained in the generalized entanglement wedge; and that it reduces to the AdS prescription as a special case. The zigzag explicitly constructs a preferred Cauchy slice that renders the simple wedge accessible from a; thus it adds a novel structure even in AdS. So far, no spacelike construction is known to reproduce these results, even in time-symmetric settings. This may have implications for the modeling of holographic encoding by tensor networks.

AdS-CFT Correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2025

An apologia for islands

Entanglement islands have played a key role in the recent derivation of the Page curve and other progress on the black hole information problem. Arising from the inclusion of connected wormhole saddles in a gravitational replica trick, islands signal that degrees of freedom in the black hole interior are not microscopically independent of the exterior Hawking radiation. Islands were originally discovered in the context of AdS/CFT coupled to an external, nongravitating reservoir, where the coupling gives graviton excitations an anomalous boundary scaling dimension (or “mass”). It has been claimed in the literature that this mass is crucial for the existence of islands and even the Page curve itself. In this paper, however, we explain how entanglement islands can also appear in setups with massless gravitons and no external reservoir, giving a number of examples including the entanglement wedges of boundary CFT regions, of radiation at null infinity in asymptotically flat spacetimes, and of radiation inside a semiclassical but gravitating spacetime. In each case, the Page curve is physically observable and can be determined with sufficiently careful experiments on many copies of the black hole. We give general arguments for the existence of gauge-invariant operators in gravity which are compactly supported to all orders in perturbation theory (whenever no isometries of the background spacetime exist) and refine a recently-proposed explicit construction of such operators. When applied to islands, these results — together with entanglement wedge reconstruction — guarantee that semiclassical operators in the island can be approximated by nonperturbative operators on the Hawking radiation.

AdS-CFT Correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2025

Nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe

We study how meaningful physical predictions can arise in nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe. In such settings, recent developments suggest that the quantum gravitational Hilbert space is one-dimensional and real for each α-sector, as induced by spacetime wormholes. This appears to obstruct the conventional quantum-mechanical prescription of assigning probabilities via projection onto a basis of states. While previous approaches have introduced external observers or augmented the theory to resolve this issue, we argue that quantum gravity itself contains all the necessary ingredients to make physical predictions. We demonstrate that the emergence of classical observables and probabilistic outcomes can be understood as a consequence of partial observability: physical observers access only a subsystem of the universe. Tracing out the inaccessible degrees of freedom yields reduced density matrices that encode classical information, with uncertainties exponentially suppressed by the environment’s entropy. We develop this perspective using both the Lorentzian path integral and operator formalisms and support it with a simple microscopic model. Our results show that quantum gravity in a closed universe naturally gives rise to meaningful, robust predictions without recourse to external constructs.

AdS-CFT Correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2025

Do holographic CFT states have unique semiclassical bulk duals?

Here, we discuss a situation where a holographic CFT state has multiple semiclassical bulk duals. In our example, a given holographic state has two simple, semiclassical descriptions, one with a closed universe, constructed using the gravitational path integral, and one without a closed universe, constructed using the extrapolate dictionary. This highlights an ambiguity in the AdS/CFT dictionary. We propose various options for resolving this tension although none is perfectly satisfactory. We also discuss what this implies for the black hole interior and the gravitational path integral.

AdS/CFT correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2025

Holography vs. Scale Separation

In this work, we point out a contradiction between holography and scale-separated AdS (i.e. parametrically large mass gap) in string theory, making the standard assumption that the holographic CFT describes the IR degrees of freedom on a brane that decouple from gravity. We show that the CFT can only decouple from gravity if the scalar potential in the dual AdS satisfies a certain criterion. Namely, there must exist a scalar field trajectory that follows the gradient of the scalar potential to the asymptotic region of the scalar field space in which limit $\partial_ϕ\ln(V)\partial_ϕ\ln(Λ_s)\leq2/(d-2)$, where $Λ_s$ is the quantum gravity cut-off. This condition, which generically implies lack of scale-separation, is satisfied in the standard examples of AdS/CFT. However, proposed attempts at achieving scale separation, such as DGKT, employ scalar potentials that violate this condition. We therefore conclude that the CFT duals of DGKT vacua cannot exist in string theory. Barring fine-tuning, our conclusions apply to other Ricci-flat flux compactifications including the KKLT scenario which relies on scale separation to obtain a metastable de Sitter uplift.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

High-Q Superconducting Lumped-Element Resonators for Low-Mass Axion Searches

Low-frequency superconducting lumped-element resonators have recently attracted significant attention in the context of axion dark matter searches. Here we present the design and implementation of a fixed-frequency superconducting resonator operating near $250~\mathrm{kHz}$, possessing an inductor volume of $\sim 1$ liter and achieving an unloaded quality factor $Q \approx 2.1\times10^{6}$. This resonator represents a significant improvement over the state of the art and informs the design of searches for low-mass axions.

FOS: Physical sciences↗