Sung-Won Kim, Mu-In Park

On general grounds, one may argue that a black hole stops radiation at the Planck mass, where the radiated energy is comparable to the black hole's mass. And also, it has been argued that there would be a "wormhole-like" structure, known as "space-time foam", due to large fluctuations below the Planck length. In this paper, as an explicit example, we consider an exact classical solution which represents nicely those two properties in a recently proposed quantum gravity model based on different scaling dimensions between space and time coordinates. The solution, called "Black Wormhole", consists of two different states, depending on its mass M and an IR parameter omega: For the black hole state, a non-traversable wormhole occupies the interior region of the black hole around the singularity at the origin, whereas for the wormhole state, the interior wormhole is exposed to an outside observer as the black hole horizon is disappeared from evaporation. The black hole state becomes thermodynamically stable as it approaches to the merge point where the interior wormhole throat and the black hole horizon merges, and the Hawking temperature vanishes at the exact merge point. This solution suggests the "Generalized Cosmic Censorship" by the existence of a wormhole-like structure which protects the naked singularity even after the black hole evaporation. One could understand the would-be wormholes inside the black hole horizon as the results of microscopic wormholes created by "negative" energy quanta which have entered the black hole horizon in Hawking radiation processes: The quantum black hole could be a wormhole factory. It is found that this speculative picture may be consistent with the recent "ER=EPR" proposal for resolving the recent black hole entanglement debates.

Sandipan Sengupta

We propose a new solution to the cosmological constant problem building on a nonperturbative quantum theory of gravity with torsional instantons. These pseudoparticles, which were recently found to exist in a first order formulation of Giddings-Strominger axionic gravity, carry nontrivial Nieh-Yan topological charge. The nonperturbative ground state as generated due to tunneling effects is shown to be stable under quantum fluctuations. Within this framework, the associated vacuum angle, namely the Barbero-Immirzi topological parameter, gets fixed to a numerical value determined by the Hubble constant.

Matthew Kleban, Mehrdad Mirbabayi, Massimo Porrati

A recent paper argued that it is not possible to infer the energy scale of inflation from the amplitude of tensor fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, because the usual connection is substantially altered if there are a large number of universally coupled fields present during inflation, with mass less than the inflationary Hubble scale. We give a simple argument demonstrating that this is incorrect.

Juan Maldacena

We discuss the possibility of devising cosmological observables which violate Bell's inequalities. Such observables could be used to argue that cosmic scale features were produced by quantum mechanical effects in the very early universe. As a proof of principle, we propose a somewhat elaborate inflationary model where a Bell inequality violating observable can be constructed.

Hiroaki Matsueda

We examine geometry and dynamics of classical spacetime derived from entanglement spectrum. The spacetime is a kind of canonical parameter space defined by the Fisher information metric. As a concrete example, we focus on the spectrum for free fermions in spatially one dimension. The spectrum has exponential family form like thermal probability distribution owing to mixed-state feature emerging from truncation of environmental degrees of freedom. In this case, the Fisher metric is given by the second derivative of the Hessian potential that can be identified with the entanglement entropy. We emphasize that the canonical parameters are nontrivial functions of partial system size by the truncation, filling fraction of fermions, and time. Then, the precise determination of this nontrivial mapping is necessary to derive the functional form of the Hessian potential that leads to correct entanglement entropy scaling. By this potential, we find that the emergent geometry becomes anti-de Sitter spacetime with imaginary time, and a radial axis as well as spacetime coordinates appears spontaneously. We also find that the information of the UV limit of the original free fermions lives in the boundary of the anti-de Sitter spacetime. These findings strongly suggest that the Hessian potential for free fermions has enough geometrical meaning associated with gauge-gravity correspondence. Furthermore, some deformation of the spectrum near the conformal fixed point is mapped onto spacetime dynamics. The fluctuation of the entanglement entropy embedded into the spacetime behaves like free scaler field, and the dynamics is described by the Einstein equation with a negative cosmological constant. Therefore, the Einstein equation can be regarded as the equation of original quantum state.