Related papers: Landscapes at Colliders
It is speculated that the correct theory of fundamental physics includes a large landscape of states, which can be described as a potential which is a function of N scalar fields and some number of discrete variables. The properties of such…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
We suggest a novel picture of the quantum Universe -- its creation is described by the {\em density matrix} defined by the Euclidean path integral. This yields an ensemble of universes -- a cosmological landscape -- in a mixed state which…
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient spectral features that vanish at late times, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations. Of particular…
In [1], KKLT give a mechanism to generate de Sitter vacua in string theory. And the scenario, \emph{Landscape}, is suggested to explain the problem of the cosmological constant. In this paper, adopting a simple potential describing the…
We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck…
One often hears that the strong $CP$ problem is the one problem which cannot be solved by anthropic reasoning. We argue that this is not so. Due to nonperturbative dynamics, states with a different $CP$ violating paramenter $\theta$ acquire…
One of the unique features of quantum gravity is the lack of local observables and the completeness of boundary observables. We show that the existence of boundary observables for particles with mass…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy…
We propose a novel explanation for the smallness of the observed cosmological constant (CC). Regions of space with a large CC are short lived and are dynamically driven to crunch soon after the end of inflation. Conversely, regions with a…
Future cosmological surveys will probe the expansion history of the universe and constrain phenomenological models of dark energy. Such models do not address the fine-tuning problem of the vacuum energy, i.e. the cosmological constant…
We propose a unification of some fine-tuning problems -- really in this article only the problem of why the weak scale is so small in energy compared to a presumed fundamental scale, being say the Planck scale -- by postulating the zero or…
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'…
In this colloquium-level account, I describe the cosmological constant problem: why is the energy of empty space at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it from the Standard Model of particle physics? I…
One of the puzzles of the Standard Model is why the mass parameter which determines the scale of the Weak interactions is closer to the scale of QCD than to the Grand Unification or Planck scales. We discuss a novel approach to this problem…
Though some LHC searches for new physics exceed the TeV scale, there may be discoveries waiting to be made at much lower masses. We outline a simple quirk model, motivated by models that address the hierarchy problem through neutral…
Superstring flux compactifications can stabilize all moduli while leading to an enormous number of vacua solutions, each leading to different $4-d$ laws of physics. While the string landscape provides at present the only plausible…
The cosmological constant (CC) problem is the biggest enigma of theoretical physics ever. In recent times, it has been rephrased as the dark energy problem in order to encompass a wider spectrum of possibilities. It is, in any case, a…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance physics, corresponding to an energy at least as large as the Fermi scale. The…