Related papers: Populating the Whole Landscape
A Multiverse can arise from landscapes without de Sitter minima. It can be populated during a period of eternal inflation without trans-Planckian field excursions and without flat potentials. This Multiverse can explain the values of the…
Since the advent of inflation, several theorems have been proven suggesting that although inflation can (and generically does) continue eternally into the future, it cannot be extended eternally into the past to create a ``steady-state''…
We develop our recent suggestion that inflation may be made past eternal, so that there is no initial cosmological singularity or "beginning of time". Inflation with multiple vacua generically approaches a steady-state statistical…
Multiple axions form a landscape in the presence of various shift symmetry breaking terms. Eternal inflation populates the axion landscape, continuously creating new universes by bubble nucleation. Slow-roll inflation takes place after the…
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…
It has recently been shown that in single field slow-roll inflation the total volume cannot grow by a factor larger than e^(S_dS/2) without becoming infinite. The bound is saturated exactly at the phase transition to eternal inflation where…
The much-discussed swampland conjectures suggest significant constraints on the properties of string theory landscape and on the nature of the multiverse that this landscape can support. The conjectures are especially constraining for…
A semi-classical analysis of vacuum energy in the expanding spacetime suggests that the cosmological term decays with time, with a concomitant matter production. For early times we find, in Planck units, $\Lambda \approx H^4$, where H is…
During eternal inflation, a landscape of vacua can be populated by the nucleation of bubbles. These bubbles inevitably collide, and collisions sometimes displace the field into a new minimum in a process known as a classical transition. In…
For the first time, we investigate the non-perturbative dynamics of single field inflation with a departure from slow-roll. Using simulations, we find that oscillatory features in the potential can drastically alter the course of inflation,…
It is shown that the de Sitter state is invariant with respect to Wick rotation. In imaginary time, super- horizon quantum and classical metric fluctuations of the empty FLRW space (with no matter fields) form a self-consistent de Sitter…
We show that eternal inflation is compatible with holography. In particular, we emphasize that if a region is asymptotically de Sitter in the future, holographic arguments by themselves place no bound on the number of past e-foldings. We…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
We introduce a novel correlation, $n_s$ - $\Delta N$, connecting CMB parameters to the required total e-folds for eternal inflation. This correlation provides a robust tool for evaluating eternal (string) inflation models using CMB data and…
Eternal inflation is shown to require violations of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) on superhorizon scales. With light scalar fields as the matter sources in a de Sitter background, there can be no classical or semiclassical violations of…
We suggest that spontaneous eternal inflation can provide a natural explanation for the thermodynamic arrow of time, and discuss the underlying assumptions and consequences of this view. In the absence of inflation, we argue that systems…
We show that Inflation in a False Vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a spectator scalar field non minimally coupled to gravity. The field is unstable in this background, it grows exponentially and slows down the pure de Sitter phase…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
We show that in any model of non-eternal inflation satisfying the null energy condition, the area of the de Sitter horizon increases by at least one Planck unit in each inflationary e-folding. This observation gives an operational meaning…
The empty space (with no matter fields) is not really empty because of natural metric fluctuations, quantum and classical. We show that gravitons as well as classical gravitational waves of super-horizon wavelengths are able to form the de…