Related papers: The Self-Organized Critical Multiverse
The nature of phase boundaries in the QCD phase diagram has not been satisfactorily explored by experiments. Based on the Ginzburg-Landau free energy with a spatially inhomogeneous term as a function of a scalar order parameter, it is…
We introduce a formalism based on a continuous time approximation, to study the characteristics of Page Rank random walks. We find that the diffusion of the occupancy probability has a dynamics that exponentially "forgets" the initial…
After reviewing the cosmological constant problem - why is Lambda not huge? - I outline the two basic approaches that had emerged by the late 1980s, and note that each made a clear prediction. Precision cosmological experiments now indicate…
We investigate the large population dynamics of a family of stochastic particle systems with three-state cyclic individual behaviour and parameter-dependent transition rates. On short time scales, the dynamics turns out to be approximated…
We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…
We argue that, in the presence of time-dependent fluxes and quantum corrections, four-dimensional de Sitter solutions should appear in the type IIB string landscape and not in the swampland. Our construction considers generic choices of…
We present an experimental study of density and order fluctuations in the vicinity of the solid-liquid-like transition that occurs in a vibrated quasi-two-dimensional granular system. The two-dimensional projected static and dynamic…
We consider degrees of freedom for a quantum de Sitter spacetime. The problem is studied from both a Lorentzian and a Euclidean perspective. From a Lorentzian perspective, we compute dynamical properties of the static patch de Sitter…
We construct a large new class of de Sitter (and anti de Sitter) vacua of critical string theory from flux compactifications on products of Riemann surfaces. In the construction, the leading effects stabilizing the moduli are perturbative.…
We show that soft spheres interacting with a linear ramp potential when overcompressed beyond the jamming point fall in an amorphous solid phase which is critical, mechanically marginally stable and share many features with the jamming…
A stochastic cellular automaton exhibiting parity conserving class transition has been investigated in the presence of quenched spatial disorder by large scale simulations. Numerical evidence has been found that weak disorder causes…
The dynamical generation of a four-dimensional classical universe from nothing but fundamental quantum excitations at the Planck scale is a long-standing challenge to theoretical physicists. A candidate theory of quantum gravity which…
It has been notoriously difficult to construct a meta-stable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in string theory in a controlled approximation. This suggests the possibility that meta-stable dS belongs to the swampland. In this paper, we propose a…
Fluctuations play an important role in the dynamics of stochastic systems. In particular, for small systems, the most probable thermodynamic quantities differ from their averages because of the fluctuations. Using the Onsager Machlup…
We study optimization problems whereby the optimization variable is a probability measure. Since the probability space is not a vector space, many classical and powerful methods for optimization (e.g., gradients) are of little help. Thus,…
The approximate late conformal time wavefunction for self-interacting scalar quantum fields in de Sitter space is computed. It dominates for conformal times much larger than a certain critical value, $\eta=\eta_{\text{crit}}$ which depends…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
We study the global geometry of the energy landscape of a simple model of a self-gravitating system, the self-gravitating ring (SGR). This is done by endowing the configuration space with a metric such that the dynamical trajectories are…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
We investigate oscillating instanton solutions of a self-gravitating scalar field between degenerate vacua. We show that there exist O(4)-symmetric oscillating solutions in a de Sitter background. The geometry of this solution is finite and…