de Sitter space and extremal surfaces for spheres

Following arXiv:1501.03019 [hep-th], we study de Sitter space and spherical subregions on a constant boundary Euclidean time slice of the future boundary in the Poincare slicing. We show that as in that case, complex extremal surfaces exist here as well: for even boundary dimensions, we isolate the universal coefficient of the logarithmically divergent term in the area of these surfaces. There are parallels with analytic continuation of the Ryu-Takayanagi expressions for holographic entanglement entropy in AdS/CFT. We then study the free energy of the dual Euclidean CFT on a sphere holographically using the dS/CFT dictionary with a dual de Sitter space in global coordinates, and a classical approximation for the wavefunction of the universe. For even dimensions, we again isolate the coefficient of the logarithmically divergent term which is expected to be related to the conformal anomaly. We find agreement including numerical factors between these coefficients. (C) 2015 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).