Maltz Jonathan, Susskind Leonard
Center for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Mar 10;118(10):101602. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.101602. Epub 2017 Mar 7.
A quantum mechanical formulation of de Sitter cosmological spacetimes still eludes string theory. In this Letter we conjecture a potentially rigorous framework in which the status of de Sitter space is the same as that of a resonance in a scattering process. We conjecture that transition amplitudes between certain states with asymptotically supersymmetric flat vacua contain resonant pole characteristic metastable intermediate states. A calculation employing constrained instantons illustrates this idea.