Microscopic origin of the entropy of de Sitter spacetime

Abstract: We construct an infinite family of semiclassical de Sitter (dS) microstates, realized as backreacted geometries of dS spacetime with a constant tension thin-shell brane located outside the dS event horizon. The contribution of wormholes in semiclassical gravitational path integral computations of overlaps between these microstates implies that they are not fully orthogonal. We count the dimension of the Hilbert space spanned by these dS microstates and find that it equals the exponential of the Gibbons-Hawking entropy of the de Sitter spacetime. Our construction provides a gravitational states counting derivation of Gibbons-Hawking formula for dS entropy.