Towards a holographic description of closed universes

Abstract: We study baby closed universes in AdS, focusing on the Antonini-Sasieta-Swingle (AS$^2$) cosmology, which arises in the gravitational description of partially entangled thermal states (PETS), as well as the classical example of Maldacena-Maoz (MM). We show that the algebraic formulation of AdS/CFT--and in particular the subregion-subalgebra duality--provides a natural framework for describing such universes within the standard AdS/CFT setting, phrased in terms of an operator algebra ${\cal M}$ and a state $\omega$ on that algebra, with no need to introduce observers. The algebra encodes all physical operations in the closed universe, and, in principle, all physical observables are obtainable from the pair $({\cal M},\omega)$. Along the way, we propose a resolution to a puzzle raised by Antonini and Rath (AR) and reinforced by recent arguments of Engelhardt and Gesteau and a no-go theorem of Gesteau: that a semiclassical baby universe in the AS$^2$ cosmology cannot be understood from the boundary in the usual manner. Our analysis motivates an averaged large-$N$ limit as part of the AdS/CFT dictionary and points toward a unified treatment of spacetimes of all asymptotics in terms of operator algebras. Finally, our boundary descriptions of closed universes indicate that for small but finite $G_N$ there should exist a semiclassical description of a macroscopic closed universe, rather than a one-dimensional Hilbert space, and we discuss weaknesses in arguments favoring the latter.