11:30 am 3rd Floor Atrium
On the Phase of the de Sitter Density of States.
The one-loop gravitational path integral around Euclidean de Sitter space S^D has a complex phase that casts doubt on a state counting interpretation. Recently, it was proposed to cancel this phase by including an observer. We explore this proposal in the case where the observer is a charged black hole in equilibrium with the de Sitter horizon. We compute the phase of the one-loop determinant within a two-dimensional dilaton gravity reduction, using both numerical and analytical methods. Our results interpolated between previous studies of a probe geodesic observer and the Nariai solution. We also revisit the prescription for going from the Euclidean path integral to the state-counting partition function, finding a positive sign in the final density of states. This talk will be mainly based on arXiv:2511.01400.