Related papers: Age-dependent decay in the landscape
We discuss aspects of the problem of assigning probabilities in eternal inflation. In particular, we investigate a recent suggestion that the lowest energy de Sitter vacuum in the landscape is effectively stable. The associated proposal for…
Among the suggested solutions to the cosmological constant problem, we find the idea of a dynamic vacuum, with an energy density decaying with the universe expansion. We investigate the possibility of a variation in the gravitational…
Making cosmological predictions in a multiverse is a fundamental theoretical challenge. Assuming that (quasi-)de Sitter vacua are quantum mechanically described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, we develop a detailed framework for…
The hypothesis of the scale invariance of the macroscopic empty space, which intervenes through the cosmological constant, has led to new cosmological models. They show an accelerated cosmic expansion and satisfy several major cosmological…
We present new solutions of vacuum decay in non-Minkowski spacetimes. On a de Sitter background, the tunneling between vacuum states with a nonvanishing energy difference has been considered, whereas in the special case of degenerate vacua…
I examine some non-anthropic approaches to the string landscape. These approaches are based on finding the initial conditions of the universe using the wavefunction of the multiverse to select the most probable vacuum out of this landscape.…
We consider a nonsingular deflationary cosmological model with decaying vacuum energy density in universes of arbitrary spatial curvature. Irrespective of the value of $k$, the models are characterized by an arbitrary time scale $H_I^{-1}$…
Comments on the paper "Late Time Behavior of false Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States" [arXiv:0711.1821] by L. M. Krauss and J. Dent are presented and the possible behavior of the unstable…
We use analytic estimates and numerical simulations to explore the stochastic approach to vacuum decay. According to this approach, the time derivative of a scalar field, which is in a local vacuum state, develops a large fluctuation and…
We show that the geometry of cutoffs on eternal inflation strongly constrains predictions for the timescales of vacuum domination, curvature domination, and observation. We consider three measure proposals: the causal patch, the fat…
We propose a new class of metastable dark energy (DE) phenomenological models in which the DE decay rate does not depend on external parameters such as the scale factor or the curvature of the Universe. Instead, the DE decay rate is assumed…
It was recently suggested that the cosmological constant problem as viewed in a non-perturbative framework is intimately connected to the choice of time and a physical Hamiltonian. We develop this idea further by calculating the…
The lower limit on the age of the universe derived from globular cluster dating techniques, which previously strongly motivated a non-zero cosmological constant, has now been dramatically reduced, allowing consistency for a flat matter…
We study the evolution of biased domain walls in the early universe. We explicitly discuss the roles played by the surface tension and volume pressure in the evolution of the walls, and quantify their effects by looking at the collapse of…
Recently, a novel phenomenon is observed for vacuum decay to proceed via classically allowed dynamical evolution from initial configurations of false vacuum fluctuations. With the help of some occasionally developed large fluctuations in…
There is mounting observational evidence that the expansion of our Universe is undergoing a late-time acceleration. Among many proposals to describe this phenomenon, the cosmological constant seems to be the simplest and the most natural…
Observation indicates that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and favours a dynamical cosmological constant, \Lambda(t). We consider the possibility that this is due to a scalar field which has undergone a very recent phase…
For landscapes of field theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima--so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps'…
As an extension of $\Lambda$CDM, the decaying vacuum model (DV) describes the dark energy as a varying vacuum whose energy density decays linearly with the Hubble parameter in the late-times, $\rho_\Lambda(t) \propto H(t)$, and produces the…
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…