Small black hole in de Sitter as an observer

Abstract

We study the Euclidean path integral around magnetically charged lukewarm black holes in four-dimensional de Sitter space. We numerically determine the full one-loop spectrum of coupled graviton and photon fluctuations and find that the phase of the partition function agrees with that of pure gravity in empty de Sitter plus a worldline observer. In the small-mass limit, certain localized eigenmodes can be effectively viewed as describing the observer's motion and have the expected eigenvalues, allowing us to reconstruct the worldline action. We further identify these modes with translational zero modes of an extremal charged black hole in asymptotically flat spacetime, lifted by de Sitter curvature.