De Sitter Space has no Chords. Almost Everything is Confined

Abstract

This paper describes a phenomenon in which all but a tiny fraction of the fundamental holographic degrees of the SYK theory are confined (as in quark confinement) in the double-scaled infinite temperature limit. The mechanism for confinement is an essential ingredient in the duality between DSSYK and de Sitter space. The mechanism, which removes almost all states from the physical spectrum of the bulk de Sitter theory applies to configurations of a small number of fermions which would be expected to comprise Hawking radiation in de Sitter space. Without confinement there would be far too many species of Hawking particles. The mechanism also applies to configurations with larger number of fermions, including the objects described by chord diagrams.