Related papers: Islands in the landscape
We show that the entropy of de Sitter space in any dimension can be understood as the entropy of a highly excited string located near the horizon. The string tension is renormalized to $T \sim \Lambda$ due to the large gravitational…
We review the advanced version of the KKLT construction and pure $d=4$ de Sitter supergravity, involving a nilpotent multiplet, with regard to various conjectures that de Sitter state cannot exist in string theory. We explain why we…
In this note we perform a synopsis of the life-times from vacuum decay of several de Sitter vacuum constructions in string/M-theory which have a single dS minimum arising from lifting a pre-existing AdS extremum and no other local minima…
We provide an overview of the string landscape and the Swampland program. Our review of the string landscape covers the worldsheet and spacetime perspectives, including vacua and string dualities. We then review and motivate the Swampland…
A free-theory vacuum state of an interacting field theory, e.g. quantum gravity, is unstable at tree level in general due to spontaneous emission of Fock-space particles in any spacetime with no global timelike Killing vectors, such as de…
We consider black holes in 2d de Sitter JT gravity coupled to a CFT, and entangled with matter in a disjoint non-gravitating universe. Tracing out the entangling matter leaves the CFT in a density matrix whose stress tensor backreacts on…
Exact string solutions are presented, providing backgrounds where a dynamical change of topology is occuring. This is induced by the time variation of a modulus field. Some lessons are drawn concerning the region of validity of effective…
Many Sun-like stars are observed to host close-in super-Earths (SEs) as part of a multi-planetary system. In such a system, the spin of the SE evolves due to spin-orbit resonances and tidal dissipation. In the absence of tides, the planet's…
Motivated by our earlier argument that the apparent large cosmological constant from quantum fluctuations is actually an artifact of not using a full quantum mechanical superposition to determine the ground state in which the universe lives…
It appears to be difficult within string theory to obtain genuine scale separation between spacetime and the internal sector. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for scale-separated vacua which hinges on stringy effects that are…
Supercritical string theories in D>10 dimensions with no moduli are described, generalizing the asymmetric orientifold construction of one of the authors. By taking the number of dimensions to be large and turning on fluxes, dilaton…
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.…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
It is found that de-Sitter spacetime, the constant-curvature matter-free solution of the Einstein equations with a positive cosmological constant, becomes classically unstable due to the dynamic effects of a certain type of vector field…
In generic models of cosmological inflation, quantum fluctuations strongly influence the spacetime metric and produce infinitely many regions where the end of inflation (reheating) is delayed until arbitrarily late times. The geometry of…
It is shown that the de Sitter state is invariant with respect to Wick rotation. In imaginary time, super- horizon quantum and classical metric fluctuations of the empty FLRW space (with no matter fields) form a self-consistent de Sitter…
We discover that some unstable vacua have long memory. By that we mean that even in the theories containing only massive particles, there are correllators and expectation values which grow with time. We examine the cases of instabilities…
Making cosmological predictions in a multiverse is a fundamental theoretical challenge. Assuming that (quasi-)de Sitter vacua are quantum mechanically described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, we develop a detailed framework for…
We develop our recent suggestion that inflation may be made past eternal, so that there is no initial cosmological singularity or "beginning of time". Inflation with multiple vacua generically approaches a steady-state statistical…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…