Related papers: Islands in the landscape
We analyze the cosmological role of terminal vacua in the string theory landscape, and point out that existing work on this topic makes very strong assumptions about the properties of the terminal vacua. We explore the implications of…
We find ourselves in an extended era of entropy production. Unlike most other observations, the arrow of time is usually regarded as a constraint on initial conditions. I argue, however, that it primarily constrains the vacuum structure of…
We present a brief overview of attempts to construct de Sitter vacua in string theory and explain how the results of this 20-year endeavor could point to the fact that string theory harbors no de Sitter vacua at all. Making such a statement…
We show that the observational universe may emerge classically from a de Sitter background with low energy scale. We find, after calculating the curvature perturbation, that the resulting scenario is actually a style of the eternal…
We study some aspects of fine tuning in inflationary scenarios within string theory flux compactifications and, in particular, in models of accidental inflation. We investigate the possibility that the apparent fine-tuning of the low energy…
Assuming that inflation happened through a series of tunneling in the string theory landscape, it is argued that one can determine the structure of vacua using precise measurements of the scalar spectral index and tensor perturbations at…
We outline the construction of metastable de Sitter vacua of type IIB string theory. Our starting point is highly warped IIB compactifications with nontrivial NS and RR three-form fluxes. By incorporating known corrections to the…
All possible evolution scenarios of a thin vacuum shell surrounding the spherically symmetric de Sitter space have been determined and the corresponding global geometries have been constructed. Such configurations can appear at the final…
We consider the statistical properties of vacua and inflationary trajectories associated with a random multifield potential. Our underlying motivation is the string landscape, but our calculations apply to general potentials. Using random…
We study the problem of obtaining de Sitter and inflationary vacua from dimensional reduction of double field theory (DFT) on nongeometric string backgrounds. In this context, we consider a new class of effective potentials that admit…
We posit the existence of the Marshland within string theory. This region is the boundary between the landscape of consistent low-energy limits of quantum gravity, and the swampland of theories that cannot be embedded within string theory…
We construct simple standing wave solutions in a 5D space-time with a ghost scalar field. The nodes of these standing waves are 'islands' of 4D Minkowski space-time. For the 5D model with increasing (decreasing) warp factor there are a…
I apply recently proposed "Swampland" conjectures to eternal inflation in single-scalar field theories. Eternal inflation is a phase of infinite self-reproduction of a quasi-de Sitter universe which has been argued to be a generic…
The cosmological constant and electroweak hierarchy problem have been a great inspiration for research. Nevertheless, the resolution of these two naturalness problems remains mysterious from the perspective of a low-energy effective field…
It is shown how metastable de Sitter vacua might arise from heterotic M-theory. The balancing of its two non-perturbative effects, open membrane instantons against gaugino condensation on the hidden boundary, which act with opposing forces…
We investigate inflation in a multi-dimensional landscape with a hierarchy of energy scales, motivated by the string theory, where the energy scale of Kahler moduli is usually assumed to be much lower than that of complex structure moduli…
The late-time behavior of our universe is one of accelerated expansion, or that of a de Sitter space, and therefore motivates us to look for time-dependent backgrounds. Finding such backgrounds in string theory has always been a challenging…
Multiple axions form a landscape in the presence of various shift symmetry breaking terms. Eternal inflation populates the axion landscape, continuously creating new universes by bubble nucleation. Slow-roll inflation takes place after the…
Recently we introduced an inflationary setup in which the inflaton fields are matrix valued scalar fields with a generic quartic potential, M-flation. In this work we study the landscape of various inflationary models arising from…
If the observed dark energy is a cosmological constant, the canonical state of the universe is de Sitter spacetime. In such a spacetime, quantum fluctuations that violate the null energy condition will create islands of matter that, if…