de Sitter Harmonies: Cosmological Spacetimes as Resonances

Abstract

The aim of this work is to provided the details of a calculation summarized in the recent paper by Maltz and Susskind which conjectured a potentially rigorous framework where the status of de Sitter space is the same as that of a resonance in a scattering process. The conjecture being that transition amplitudes between certain states with asymptotically supersymmetric flat vacua contain resonant poles characteristic metastable intermediate states. A calculation employing constrained instantons is presented that illustrates this idea.