Black Holes and Toy Cosmologies in Higher Spin Gravity

Download or read book Black Holes and Toy Cosmologies in Higher Spin Gravity written by Arnaud Lepage-Jutier and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis studies some consequences of including massless higher spin fields to gravitational theories with a cosmological constant, in three and four dimensions. We first review the construction of higher spin gravity theories in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) and de Sitter (dS) spacetimes. We use these theories to both test and expand the holographic duality known as the AdS/CFT correspondence. This duality relates the bulk gravity to a conformal field theory (CFT) on the asymptotic boundary of the spacetime. We then analyze the matter content of the three-dimensional theories, and present an argument to single out a higher spin structure in the semi-classical limit. Thirdly, the thermodynamical stability of black holes in AdS space in higher spin gravity is addressed. A large degeneracy of low energy states is shown to smooth out the Hawking-Page phase transition in the limit of zero 't Hooft coupling. Next, we observe that non-trivial topology of the future time infinity boundary leads to a puzzle for the computation of the wave-function of the universe in the higher spin realization of dS/CFT. The growth of the wave-function with the genus of the boundary comes once again from low energy states and we discuss the implication of this divergence. Finally, we consider recent developments in higher spin gravity and mention various research opportunities." --