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A causal patch is a region of spacetime connected within the relativistic framework of causality (causal light cones).

Background

After Leonard Susskind proposed the black hole complementarity conjecture for black holes in quantum gravity, he realized it would also apply to a de Sitter universe with a positive cosmological constant with the cosmological horizon in place of the event horizon. The region within the horizon is the causal patch, and it is self-contained. This means we may neglect what happens beyond the cosmological horizon. A consequence of this radical conjecture is that the total number of states of the universe is finite.

References

1. Dyson, Lisa; Kleban, Matthew; Susskind, Leonard (October 2002). "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2002 (10): 011. arXiv:hep-th/0208013. Bibcode:2002JHEP...10..011D. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2002/10/011. S2CID 2344440.
2. Goheer, Naureen; Kleban, Matthew; Susskind, Leonard (July 2003). "The Trouble with de Sitter Space". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2003 (7): 056. arXiv:hep-th/0212209. Bibcode:2003JHEP...07..056G. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2003/07/056. S2CID 12766264.

See also

• Black hole complementarity
• de Sitter space

v t e Quantum gravity
Central concepts	AdS/CFT correspondence Batalin–Vilkovisky formalism CA-duality Causal patch Faddeev–Popov ghost Gravitational anomaly Graviton Holographic principle IR/UV mixing Planck units Quantum foam Ryu–Takayanagi conjecture Trans-Planckian problem Weinberg–Witten theorem
Toy models	2+1D topological gravity CGHS model Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity Liouville gravity RST model Topological quantum field theory
Quantum field theory in curved spacetime	Bunch–Davies vacuum Hawking radiation Semiclassical gravity Unruh effect
Black holes	Black hole complementarity Black hole information paradox Black-hole thermodynamics Bekenstein bound Bousso's holographic bound Cosmic censorship hypothesis ER = EPR Firewall (physics) Gravitational singularity
Approaches	String theory Bosonic string theory M-theory Supergravity Superstring theory Canonical quantum gravity Loop quantum gravity Wheeler–DeWitt equation Euclidean quantum gravity Hartle–Hawking state Others Causal dynamical triangulation Causal sets Dual graviton Group field theory Noncommutative geometry Spin foam Superfluid vacuum theory Twistor theory
Applications	Quantum cosmology Eternal inflation FRW/CFT duality Multiverse
See also: Template:Quantum mechanics topics

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