Holography of 3D Flat Cosmological Horizons

Abstract

We provide a first derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of 3D flat cosmological horizons in terms of the counting of states in a dual field theory. These horizons appear in the flat limit of nonextremal rotating Banados-Teitleboim-Zanelli black holes and are remnants of the inner horizons. They also satisfy the first law of thermodynamics. We study flat holography as a limit of AdS(3)/CFT(2) to semiclassically compute the density of states in the dual theory, which is given by a contraction of a 2D conformal field theory, exactly reproducing the bulk entropy in the limit of large charges. We comment on how the dual theory reproduces the bulk first law and how cosmological bulk excitations are matched with boundary quantum numbers.