Higher spin partition functions via the quasinormal mode method in de Sitter quantum gravity

Abstract

In this note we compute the 1-loop partition function of spin-ss fields on Euclidean de Sitter space S^{2n+1}S2n+1 using the quasinormal mode method. Instead of computing the quasinormal mode frequencies from scratch, we use the analytic continuation prescription L_{\text{AdS}}\to iL_{\text{dS}}LAdS→iLdS, appearing in the dS/CFT correspondence, and Wick rotate the normal mode frequencies of fields on thermal \text{AdS}_{2n+1}AdS2n+1 into the quasinormal mode frequencies of fields on de Sitter space. We compare the quasinormal mode and heat kernel methods of calculating 1-loop determinants, finding exact agreement, and furthermore explicitly relate these methods via a sum over the conformal dimension. We discuss how the Wick rotation of normal modes on thermal \text{AdS}_{2n+1}AdS2n+1 can be generalized to calculating 1-loop partition functions on the thermal spherical quotients S^{2n+1}/\mathbb{Z}_{p}S2n+1/ℤp. We further show that the quasinormal mode frequencies encode the group theoretic structure of the spherical spacetimes in question, analogous to the analysis made for thermal AdS in [1-3] .