$T\overline{T}$ and de Sitter Microstates

I'd been hesitating to get into the $T\overline{T}$ literature for a while, but it appears that now is finally the time. The $T\overline{T}$ deformation is a particular term included in a two-dimensional conformal field theory that mixes the stress energy tensor of the holomorphic and antiholomophic sectors. In the "bulk", this amounts to a particular quadratic combination of the components of the stress-energy tensor. The CFT deformation affords a flow in the associated renormalization group where computations of states and their energies remain tractable. In other words, it's an irrelevant operator that gives rise to nontrivial new physics. What's surprising is that subsequent application of this idea - the current hot topic in hep-th - has direct implications for quantum gravity, at least in three-dimensions. This week Eva Silverstein and friends have published a paper linking the TTbar deformation of the boundary conformal field theory to microstates in de Sitter quantum gravity.