English

Cosmological Implications of the String Theory Landscape

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

Progress in string theory has resulted in a whole landscape of vacua solutions.In this talk I describe a proposal for exploring the cosmological implications of the landscape, based on the dynamics of the wavefunction of the universe propagating on it. The landscape is taken as the phase space of the initial conditions since every of its vacua can potentially give rise to a universe. A superselection rule on the landscape phase space emerges when we include the backreaction of massive long wavelengths and the quantum dynamics of gravitational and matter degrees of freedom. The quantum dynamics of the system selects only high energy patches which survive the collapse induced by the gravitational instability of massive perturbations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0609157,
  title  = {Cosmological Implications of the String Theory Landscape},
  author = {Laura Mersini-Houghton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0609157},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

7 pages, Talk given at 'The Dark Side of the Universe 2006', Madrid. To be published by AIP

R2 v1 2026-07-22T14:11:09.623Z