Higher Spin de Sitter Hilbert Space

Abstract: We propose a complete microscopic definition of the Hilbert space of minimal higher spin de Sitter quantum gravity and its Hartle-Hawking vacuum state. The fundamental degrees of freedom are $2N$ bosonic fields living on the future conformal boundary, where $N$ is proportional to the de Sitter horizon entropy. The vacuum state is normalizable. The model agrees in perturbation theory with expectations from a previously proposed dS-CFT description in terms of a fermionic Sp(N) model, but it goes beyond this, both in its conceptual scope and in its computational power. In particular it resolves the apparent pathologies affecting the Sp(N) model, and it provides an exact formula for late time vacuum correlation functions. We illustrate this by computing probabilities for arbitrarily large field excursions, and by giving fully explicit examples of vacuum 3- and 4-point functions. We discuss bulk reconstruction and show the perturbative bulk QFT canonical commutations relations can be reproduced from the fundamental operator algebra, but only up to a minimal error term $\sim e^{-\mathcal{O}(N)}$, and only if the operators are coarse grained in such a way that the number of accessible "pixels" is less than $\mathcal{O}(N)$. Independent of this, we show that upon gauging the higher spin symmetry group, one is left with $2N$ physical degrees of freedom, and that all gauge invariant quantities can be computed by a $2N \times 2N$ matrix model. This suggests a concrete realization of the idea of cosmological complementarity.