Abstract
We study two-dimensional string theory on a time-dependent background, whose worldsheet description consists of Liouville theory at central charge c = 1 and Liouville theory at central charge c = 25, together with the conformal ghosts. We compute the tree-level three-point and four-point components of the cosmological wavefunction in string perturbation theory. The latter is evaluated numerically by decomposing the Liouville four-point correlation functions into Virasoro conformal blocks and three-point function coefficients and integrating over the moduli space of the four-punctured sphere string diagram. This computation numerically confirms a surprisingly simple conjectural result for the four-point wavefunction component whose physical interpretation remains to be clarified.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Nima Arkani-Hamed, Bruno Balthazar, Victor Gorbenko, Daniel Jafferis, Austin Joyce, Juan Maldacena, Herman Verlinde, and Xi Yin for helpful discussions, Xi Yin for comments on a draft, and the organizers of the Abu Dhabi Meeting on Theoretical Physics for the hospitality during the course of this work. This research is supported in part by the Simons Collaboration Grant on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap and by the Future Faculty in the Physical Sciences Fellowship at Princeton University.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Manuel Victor Ruiz Ceh.
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Rodriguez, V.A. A two-dimensional string cosmology. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 161 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2023)161
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2023)161