Reconstructing dS₃ with Wilson Lines

In the Chern-Simons formulation of three-dimensional gravity, Wilson lines probe gravitational physics. Wilson lines for anti- de Sitter spacetime have been shown to reconstruct known gravitational observables such as geodesic lengths, Green's functions and the quasinormal mode spectrum. In these proceedings, we will review recent work generalizing this to de Sitter gravity. We will explain how Wilson lines can reproduce Green's functions for massive scalar fields in Euclidean de Sitter spacetime, and will give Lorentzian versions of these results by performing an analytic continuation. There is a crucial role played by endpoint states which satisfy a singlet condition. The existence of exact results for su(2) Wilson loops from non-abelian localization suggests that the quantization of the Wilson line may be more tractable in de Sitter compared to anti- de Sitter spacetime.