Related papers: A New View of the Cosmic Landscape
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…
In an earlier paper, it is proposed that, due to resonance tunneling effect, tunneling from a large cosmological constant $\Lambda$ site in the stringy comic landscape can be fast, while tunneling from a small $\Lambda$ site may take…
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…
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…
The observation in the universe of a small but positive vacuum energy strongly suggests, in the string landscape picture, that there will ultimately be a phase transition to an exactly supersymmetric universe. This ground state or "true…
It is generally considered as self evident that the lifetime of our vacuum in the landscape of string theory cannot be much shorter than the current age of the universe. Here I show why this lower limit is invalid. A certain type of…
There is evidence that string theory possesses a large discretuum of stable and/or metastable ground states, with zero or four supersymmetries in four dimensions. I discuss critically the nature of this evidence. Assuming this "landscape"…
We propose that the existence of the string landscape suggests the universe can be in a quantum glass state, where an extremely large viscosity is generated, and long distance dynamics slows down. At the same time, the short distance…
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…
We argue that in the context of string theory a large number N of connected degenerate vacua that mix will lead to a ground state with much lower energy, essentially because of the standard level repulsion of quantum theory for the…
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
The suggestion that there exist causally disconnected universes or sub-universes to explain the values of physical parameters such as the cosmological constant is discussed. A statistical model of the string landscape/topography is…
Under the hypothesis that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
The energy density of the vacuum, Lambda, is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. Approaches to this problem are tightly constrained by data ranging from elementary observations to precision…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
We argue that, for generic string compactifications, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem.…
We review various aspects of de Sitter spacetime in string theory: its status as an effective field theory spacetime solution, its relation to the vacuum energy problem in string theory, its (global) holographic definition in terms of two…
We argue that the vast majority of flux vacua with small cosmological constant are unstable to rapid decay to a big crunch. Exceptions are states with large compactification volume and supersymmetric and approximately supersymmetric states.…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
Realizing dark energy and the observed de Sitter spacetime in quantum gravity has proven to be obstructed in most every usual approach. We argue that additional degrees of freedom of the left- and right-movers in string theory and a…