English

An obstacle to populating the string theory landscape

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-09-25 v2 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We construct domain walls and instantons in a class of models with coupled scalar fields, determining, in agreement with previous studies, that many such solutions contain naked timelike singularities. Vacuum bubble solutions of this type do not contain a region of true vacuum, obstructing the ability of eternal inflation to populate other vacua. We determine a criterion that potentials must satisfy to avoid the existence of such singularities, and show that many domain wall solutions in Type IIB string theory are singular. This has profound implications for applying the program of eternal inflation to making predictions in the string theory landscape.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0809.2604,
  title  = {An obstacle to populating the string theory landscape},
  author = {Matthew C Johnson and Magdalena Larfors},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.2604},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 PRD style pages with 2 embedded figures. Replaced to match published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:20:29.512Z