Alpha-vacua, black holes and AdS/CFT

The Schwarzschild, Schwarzschild-AdS and Schwarzschild-de Sitter solutions all admit freely acting discrete involutions which commute with the continuous symmetries of the spacetimes. Intuitively, these involutions correspond to the antipodal map of the corresponding spacetimes. In analogy with the ordinary de Sitter example, this allows us to construct new vacua by performing a Mottola-Allen transform on the modes associated with the Hartle-Hawking, or Euclidean, vacuum. These vacua are the 'alpha'-vacua for these black holes. The causal structure of a typical black hole may ameliorate certain difficulties which are encountered in the case of de Sitter α-vacua. For Schwarzschild-AdS black holes, a Bogoliubov transformation which mixes operators of the two boundary CFT's provides a construction of the dual CFT α-states. Finally, we analyse the thermal properties of these vacua