  We study the AdS/CFT correspondence as a probe of inflation. We assume the
existence of a string landscape containing at least one stable AdS vacuum and a
(nearby) metastable de Sitter state. Standard arguments imply that the bulk
physics in the vicinity of the AdS minimum is described by a boundary CFT. We
argue that large enough bubbles of the dS phase, including those able to
inflate, are described by mixed states in the CFT. Inflating degrees of freedom
are traced over and do not appear explicitly in the boundary description. They
nevertheless leave a distinct imprint on the mixed state. In the supergravity
approximation, analytic continuation connects AdS/CFT correlators to dS/CFT
correlators. This provides a framework for extracting further information as
well. Our work also shows that no scattering process can create an inflating
region, even by quantum tunneling, since a pure state can never evolve into a
mixed state under unitary evolution.
