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ABSTRACT: We discuss a framework for cosmological physics where the cosmological observables are related by analytic continuation to vacuum observables in a static asymptotically AdS Lorentzian wormhole geometry. The existence of these wormhole solutions appears to require states for quantum field theories on bounded regions with extremely large Casimir energies compared with those for standard boundary conditions. To check whether such states exist, we study free Dirac fermions on a bounded region via a lattice regularization, and find numerical evidence that for 3+1 dimensional Dirac fermions on a region of fixed size, there are states with uniform negative energy density of arbitrarily large magnitude.

CV:

• Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia since 2002
• Postdoc at Stanford University from 2000 until 2002
• PhD 2000, Princeton University (advisor: Washington Taylor).

Research interests: quantum gravity, quantum field theory, quantum information theory, cosmology

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