Characters, Quasinormal Modes, and Quantum de Sitter Thermodynamics

Abstract

In this short note, we review some recent progress in understanding the 1-loop corrections to the Gibbons-Hawking entropy, which amounts to studying free fields on the de Sitter static patch and the round sphere. After briefly surveying the unitary irreducible representations of the de Sitter group $SO(1,d+1)$ and their Harish-Chandra characters, we discuss the Lorentzian interpretation for the 1-loop sphere path integral for a scalar. After that we comment on how the results are modified by edge contributions for spinning fields.