A status report on the observability of cosmic bubble collisions

In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting the homogeneity and isotropy of our bubble interior, and possibly leading to detectable signatures in the observable portion of our bubble, potentially in the Cosmic Microwave Background or other precision cosmological probes. This constitutes a direct experimental test of eternal inflation and the landscape of string theory vacua. Assessing this possibility roughly splits into answering three questions: What happens in a generic bubble collision? What observational effects might be expected? How likely are we to observe a collision? In this review we report the current progress on each of these questions, improve upon a few of the existing results, and attempt to lay out directions for future work.Comment: Review article; comments very welcome. 24 pages + 4 appendices; 19 color figures. (Revised version adds two figures, minor edits.

Black Holes as Effective Geometries

Gravitational entropy arises in string theory via coarse graining over an underlying space of microstates. In this review we would like to address the question of how the classical black hole geometry itself arises as an effective or approximate description of a pure state, in a closed string theory, which semiclassical observers are unable to distinguish from the "naive" geometry. In cases with enough supersymmetry it has been possible to explicitly construct these microstates in spacetime, and understand how coarse-graining of non-singular, horizon-free objects can lead to an effective description as an extremal black hole. We discuss how these results arise for examples in Type II string theory on AdS_5 x S^5 and on AdS_3 x S^3 x T^4 that preserve 16 and 8 supercharges respectively. For such a picture of black holes as effective geometries to extend to cases with finite horizon area the scale of quantum effects in gravity would have to extend well beyond the vicinity of the singularities in the effective theory. By studying examples in M-theory on AdS_3 x S^2 x CY that preserve 4 supersymmetries we show how this can happen.Comment: Review based on lectures of JdB at CERN RTN Winter School and of VB at PIMS Summer School. 68 pages. Added reference

An infalling observer in AdS/CFT

<p>We describe the experience of an observer falling into a black hole using the AdS/CFT correspondence. In order to do this, we reconstruct the local bulk operators measured by the observer along his trajectory outside the black hole. We then extend our construction beyond the black hole horizon. We show that this is possible because of an effective doubling of the observables in the boundary theory, when it is in a pure state that is close to the thermal state. Our construction allows us to rephrase questions about information-loss and the structure of the metric at the horizon in terms of more familiar CFT correlators. It suggests that to precisely identify black-hole microstates, the observer would need to conduct measurements to an accuracy of e(-SBH). This appears to be inconsistent with the "fuzzball" proposal, and other recent proposals in which pure states in the ensemble of the black hole are represented by macroscopically distinct geometries. Furthermore, our description of the black hole interior in terms of CFT operators provides a natural realization of black hole complementarity and a method of preserving unitarity without "firewalls."</p>