English

The Multiverse in an Inverted Island

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-10-13 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We study the redundancies in the global spacetime description of the eternally inflating multiverse using the quantum extremal surface prescription. We argue that a sufficiently large spatial region in a bubble universe has an entanglement island surrounding it. Consequently, the semiclassical physics of the multiverse, which is all we need to make cosmological predictions, can be fully described by the fundamental degrees of freedom associated with certain finite spatial regions. The island arises due to mandatory collisions with collapsing bubbles, whose big crunch singularities indicate redundancies of the global spacetime description. The emergence of the island and the resulting reduction of independent degrees of freedom provides a regularization of infinities which caused the cosmological measure problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.05271,
  title  = {The Multiverse in an Inverted Island},
  author = {Kevin Langhoff and Chitraang Murdia and Yasunori Nomura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.05271},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures; minor revisions

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:01:29.279Z