Punctuated eternal inflation via AdS/CFT duality

The work is an attempt to model a scenario of inflation in the framework of anti--de Sitter/conformal field theory duality, a potentially complete nonperturbative description of quantum gravity. We study bubble geometries with de Sitter interiors within an ambient Schwarzschild anti--de Sitter black hole spacetime and the properties of the corresponding states in the dual conformal field theory. It is argued the viable bubble states can be identified with a subset of the black hole microstates. Consistency checks are performed and a number of implications regarding cosmology are discussed including how the key problems or paradoxes of conventional eternal inflation are overcome in this scenario.