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Showing posts from December, 2023

Blurring the horizon - the quantum width of the cosmic event horizon

A 2021 paper by Zurek applied a random walk argument to a black hole horizon. Credit, Zurek, 2021   Zurek called this a blurring of the horizon — a fuzzy, or uncertain horizon — and went through derivations supporting the idea that this length scale is the quantum uncertainty in the position of the black hole horizon: a dynamic quantum width of an event horizon. This is a concept which fundamentally applies to the Universe's own Cosmic Event Horizon (CEH). The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy gives the number of quantum degrees of freedom that can fluctuate. Below, we step out our own cosmic de Sitter derivation of the random walk argument. To do this, let $l_{\Lambda}$ represent the generalised de Sitter horizon scale. Due to the holographic UV/IR correspondence, this scale manifests dually: at the fundamental microscopic limit as $l_{UV} = 2L_p$, and at the macroscopic cosmological limit as $l_{IR} = c/H$. By mapping between these conformal boundaries, we can derive the limits of the...