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The discovery of the string theory landscape has recently brought attention to the eternal nature of inflation. In contrast to the common belief that eternal inflation may be a generic feature of most inflationary models, in this note we…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2007-05-23 L. Mersini-Houghton , L. Parker

Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2013-05-30 Matthew C. Johnson , Jean-Luc Lehners

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…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2015-06-03 Sergei Dubovsky , Leonardo Senatore , Giovanni Villadoro

We consider an inflationary scenario where the rate of inflaton roll defined by $\ddot\phi/H\dot \phi$ remains constant. The rate of roll is small for slow-roll inflation, while a generic rate of roll leads to the interesting case of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2018-04-09 Hayato Motohashi , Alexei A. Starobinsky , Jun'ichi Yokoyama

Motivated by the lessons of black hole complementarity, we develop a causal patch description of eternal inflation. We argue that an observer cannot ascribe a semiclassical geometry to regions outside his horizon, because the large-scale…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2008-11-26 Raphael Bousso , Ben Freivogel , I-Sheng Yang

We suggest a new type of hill-top inflation originating from the initial conditions in the form of the microcanonical density matrix for the cosmological model with a large number of quantum fields conformally coupled to gravity. Initial…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-01-27 A. O. Barvinsky , A. Yu. Kamenshchik , D. V. Nesterov

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 Alan H. Guth

We study the inflationary evolution of a scalar field $h$ with an unstable potential for the case where the Hubble parameter $H$ during inflation is larger than the instability scale $\Lambda_I$ of the potential. Quantum fluctuations in the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-03-14 John Kearney , Hojin Yoo , Kathryn M. Zurek

The phenomenon of stochastic eternal inflation is studied for a chaotic inflation potential in a Bianchi Type I spacetime background. After deriving the appropriate stochastic Klein-Gordon equation, we give details on the conditions for…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2017-03-16 Ikjyot Singh Kohli , Michael C. Haslam

Inflation creates large-scale cosmological density perturbations that are characterized by an isotropic, homogeneous, and Gaussian random distribution about a locally flat background. Even in a flat universe, the spatial curvature measured…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-04 Matthew Kleban , Marjorie Schillo

Eternally inflating universes can contain thermalized regions with different values of the cosmological parameters. In particular, the spectra of density fluctuations should be different, because of the different realizations of quantum…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-10-31 Alexander Vilenkin

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Alan H. Guth

We present an interpretation of the physics of space-times undergoing eternal inflation by repeated nucleation of bubbles. In many cases the physics can be interpreted in terms of the quantum mechanics of a system with a finite number of…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2007-05-23 T. Banks , M. Johnson

We investigate the entropy dynamics of de Sitter spacetime during the inflationary phase. The cosmological horizon in de Sitter spacetime, which limits the causally accessible region for an observer, exhibits thermal properties similar to a…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-03-24 Hiromasa Tajima , Yasusada Nambu

Everlasting inflation has far-reaching implications for cosmology and the standing of self-localizing inferences made by observers, which have been subjects of renewed interest in light of the growing acceptance of theory landscapes and the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2021-12-28 Ross N Greenwood , Anthony Aguirre

Models of eternal inflation predict a stochastic self-similar geometry of the universe at very large scales and allow existence of points that never thermalize. I explore the fractal geometry of the resulting spacetime, using…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2016-08-31 Serge Winitzki

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…

Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-24 Alan H. Guth

It was pointed out previously~\cite{Kinney:2014jya} that a sufficiently negative running of the spectral index of curvature perturbations from (ordinary i.e. cold) inflation is able to prevent eternal inflation from ever occurring. Here, we…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-09-30 Gabriele Montefalcone , Rudnei O. Ramos , Gustavo S. Vicente , Katherine Freese

In light of the recent swampland conjectures, we explore quantum cosmology and eternal inflation beyond the slow roll regime. We consider a model of a closed universe with a scalar field $\phi$ in the framework of tunneling approach to…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2023-04-19 Georgios Fanaras , Alexander Vilenkin

Using numerical solutions of the full Einstein field equations coupled to a scalar inflaton field in 3+1 dimensions, we study the conditions under which a universe that is initially expanding, highly inhomogeneous and dominated by gradient…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-09-07 William E. East , Matthew Kleban , Andrei Linde , Leonardo Senatore