Entanglement and out-of-equilibrium dynamics in holographic models of de Sitter QFTs

Abstract: In this paper we study various aspects of entanglement entropy in strongly-coupled de Sitter quantum field theories in various dimensions. We find gravity solutions that are dual to field theories in a fixed de Sitter background, both in equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium configurations. The latter corresponds to the Vaidya generalization of the AdS black hole solutions with hyperbolic topology. We compute analytically the entanglement entropy of spherical regions and show that there is a transition when the sphere is as big as the horizon. We also explore thermalization in time-dependent situations in which the system evolves from a non-equilibrium state to the Bunch-Davies state. We find that the saturation time is equal to the light-crossing time of the sphere. This behavior is faster than random walk and suggests the existence of free light-like degrees of freedom.