We study a Randall-Sundrum cosmological scenario consisting of a domain wall in anti–de Sitter space with a strongly coupled large N conformal field theory living on the wall. The AdS-CFT correspondence allows a fully quantum mechanical treatment of this CFT, in contrast with the usual treatment of matter fields in inflationary cosmology. The conformal anomaly of the CFT provides an effective tension which leads to a de Sitter geometry for the domain wall. This is the analogue of Starobinsky’s four dimensional model of anomaly driven inflation. Studying this model in a Euclidean setting gives a natural choice of boundary conditions at the horizon. We calculate the graviton correlator using the Hartle-Hawking “no boundary” proposal and analytically continue to Lorentzian signature. We find that the CFT strongly suppresses metric perturbations on all but the largest angular scales. This is true independently of how the de Sitter geometry arises, i.e., it is also true for four dimensional Einstein gravity. Since generic matter would be expected to behave like a CFT on small scales, our results suggest that tensor perturbations on small scales are far smaller than predicted by all previous calculations, which have neglected the effects of matter on tensor perturbations.

• Received 23 March 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.62.043501

This article appears in the following collection:

The Work of Stephen Hawking in Physical Review

To mark the passing of Stephen Hawking, we gathered together his 55 papers in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters. They probe the edges of space and time, from "Black holes and thermodynamics” to "Wave function of the Universe."