Related papers: Islands in the landscape
String theory has few or no stable nonsupersymmetric or de Sitter vacua, only metastable ones. Antibranes are a simple source of supersymmetry breaking, as in the KKLT model, but various arguments have been given that these fail to produce…
The transcendental expectation of string theory is that the nature of the fundamental forces, particle spectra and masses, together with coupling constants, is uniquely determined by mathematical and logical consistency, non-empirically,…
The higher-derivative $\alpha'$ corrections consistent with $O(d,d)$ duality invariance can be completely classified for cosmological, purely time-dependent backgrounds. This result is used to show that there are duality invariant theories…
Each oscillator in a linear chain (a string) interacts with a local Ising spin in contact with a thermal bath. These spins evolve according to Glauber dynamics. Below a critical temperature, a rippled state in the string is accompanied by a…
A string theory based inflationary model is developed where the inflaton interacts with a multitude of massive string level states causing dissipation of vacuum energy. Inflation terminates in a warm Universe without the need for reheating.
String theory abounds with light scalar fields (the dilaton and various moduli) which create a host of observational problems, and notably some serious cosmological difficulties similar to the ones associated with the Polonyi field in the…
Real-world systems often evolve on different timescales and possess multiple coexisting stable states. Whether or not a system returns to a given stable state after being perturbed away from it depends on the shape and extent of its basin…
In this Letter, we briefly review the multi-stream inflation scenario, and discuss its implications in the string theory landscape and the inflationary multiverse. In multi-stream inflation, the inflation trajectory encounters bifurcations.…
The landscape of string vacua is very large, but generally expected to be finite in size. Enumerating the number and properties of the vacua is an important task for both the landscape and the swampland, in part to gain a deeper…
A neutral ecology model is simulated on an island chain, in which neighbouring islands can exchange individuals but only the first island is able to receive immigrants from a metacommunity. It is found by several measures that biodiversity…
Common experience suggests that attracting invariant sets in nonlinear dynamical systems are generally stable. Contrary to this intuition, we present a dynamical system, a network of pulse-coupled oscillators, in which \textit{unstable…
We apply two independent data analysis methodologies to locate stable climate states in an intermediate complexity climate model and analyze their interplay. First, drawing from the theory of quasipotentials, and viewing the state space as…
In this paper, we present a series of supersymmetric models exhibiting an entirely new vacuum structure: towers of metastable vacua with higher and higher energies. As the number of vacua grows towards infinity, the energy of the highest…
A number of Swampland conjectures and in particular the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) suggest that de Sitter space is highly unstable if it exists at all. In this paper we construct effective theories of scalars rolling on…
Inertial observers in de Sitter are surrounded by a horizon and see thermal fluctuations. To them, a massless scalar field appears to follow a random motion but any attractive potential, no matter how weak, will eventually stabilize the…
In a recent paper [1] we showed that N=1 supersymmetric QCD in the presence of certain superpotential deformations has a rich landscape of supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric vacua. In this paper we embed this theory in string theory as a…
In this paper, we give a systematic procedure for building locally stable dS vacua in $\mathcal{N}=1$ supergravity models motivated by string theory. We assume that one of the superfields has a Kahler potential of no-scale type and impose a…
The anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT) can potentially provide a complete formulation of string theory on a landscape of stable and metastable vacua that naturally give rise to eternal inflation. As a model…
We uncover a remarkable role that an infinite hierarchy of non-linear differential equations plays in organizing and connecting certain {hat c}<1 string theories non-perturbatively. We are able to embed the type 0A and 0B (A,A) minimal…
Popular multiverse models such as the one based on the string theory landscape require an underlying set of unexplained laws containing many specific features and highly restrictive prerequisites. I explore the consequences of relaxing some…