Probing crunching AdS cosmologies

Holographic gravity duals of deformations of CFTs formulated on de Sitter spacetime contain FRW geometries behind a horizon, with cosmological big crunch singularities. Using a specific analytically tractable solution within a particular single scalar truncation of N = 8 supergravity on AdS(4), we first probe such crunching cosmologies with spacelike radial geodesics that compute spatially antipodal correlators of large dimension boundary operators. At late times, the geodesics lie on the FRW slice of maximal expansion behind the horizon. The late time two-point functions factorise, and when transformed to the Einstein static universe, they exhibit a temporal non-analyticity determined by the maximal value of the scale factor (a) over tilde (max). Radial geodesics connecting antipodal points necessarily have de Sitter energy epsilon less than or similar to (a) over tilde (max), while geodesics with epsilon > (a) over tilde (max) terminate at the crunch, the two categories of geodesics being separated by the maximal expansion slice. The spacelike crunch singularity is curved outward in the Penrose diagram for the deformed AdS backgrounds, and thus geodesic limits of the antipodal correlators do not directly probe the crunch. Beyond the geodesic limit, we point out that the scalar wave equation, analytically continued into the FRW patch, has a potential which is singular at the crunch along with complex WKB turning points in the vicinity of the FRW crunch. We then argue that the frequency space Green's function has a branch point determined by (a) over tilde (max) which corresponds to the lowest quasinormal frequency.