Recent works have revealed that quantum extremal islands can contribute to the fine-grained entropy of black hole radiation reproducing the unitary Page curve. In this paper, we use these results to assess if an observer in de Sitter space can decode information hidden behind their cosmological horizon. By computing the fine-grained entropy of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation in a region where gravity is weak we find that this is possible, but the observer’s curiosity comes at a price. At the same time the island appears, which happens much earlier than the Page time, a singularity forms which the observer will eventually hit. We arrive at this conclusion by studying de Sitter space in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. We emphasize the role of the observer collecting radiation, breaking the thermal equilibrium studied so far in the literature. By analytically solving for the backreacted geometry we show how an island appears in this out-of-equilibrium state.

We consider small perturbations to a static three-dimensional de Sitter geometry. For early enough perturbations that satisfy the null energy condition, the result is a shockwave geometry that leads to a time advance in the trajectory of geodesics crossing it. This brings the opposite poles of de Sitter space into causal contact with each other, much like a traversable wormhole in Anti-de Sitter space. In this background, we compute out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) to asses the chaotic nature of the de Sitter horizon and find that it is maximally chaotic: one of the OTOCs we study decays exponentially with a Lyapunov exponent that saturates the chaos bound. We discuss the consequences of our results for de Sitter complementarity and inflation.

We study the supersymmetry breaking induced by probe anti-D3-branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler throat geometry. Antibranes inside this geometry polarize and can be described by an NS5-brane wrapping an S 2 . When the number of antibranes is small compared to the background flux a metastable state exists that breaks supersymmetry. We present a manifestly supersymmetric effective model that realizes the polarized metastable state as a solution, spontaneously breaking the supersymmetry. The supersymmetric model relies crucially on the inclusion of Kaluza-Klein (matrix) degrees of freedom on the S 2 and two supersymmetric irrelevant deformations of N = 4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM), describing a large number of supersymmetric D3-branes in the IR. We explicitly identify the massless Goldstino and compute the spectrum of massive fluctuations around the metastable supersymmetry-breaking minimum, finding a Kaluza-Klein tower with masses warped down from the string scale. Below the Kaluza-Klein scale the massive tower can be integrated out and supersymmetry is realized nonlinearly. We comment on the effect of the Kaluza-Klein modes on the effective description of de Sitter vacua in string theory and inflationary model building.