Related papers: Vacuum Selection on the String Landscape
Arguably a major success of the landscape picture is the prediction of a small, non-zero vacuum energy density. The details of this prediction depends in part on how the diverging spacetime volume of the multiverse is regulated, a question…
There are now two cosmological constant problems: (i) why the vacuum energy is so small and (ii) why it comes to dominate at about the epoch of galaxy formation. Anthropic selection appears to be the only approach that can naturally resolve…
The "bubble universes" of Coleman and De Luccia play a crucial role in string cosmology. Since our own Universe is supposed to be of this kind, bubble cosmology should supply definite answers to the long-standing questions regarding…
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"…
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…
In the recent times a lot of effort has been devoted to improve our knowledge about the space of string theory vacua (``the landscape'') to find statistical grounds to justify how and why the theory selects its vacuum. Particularly…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
One way that an anthropic selection mechanism may be manifest in a physical theory involves multiple domains in the universe with different values of the physical parameters. If this mechanism is to be relevant for understanding the small…
We introduce network science as a framework for studying the string landscape. Two large networks of string geometries are constructed, where nodes are extra-dimensional six-manifolds and edges represent topological transitions between…
The fluctuations of the vacuum energy are treated as a non-equilibrium process and a stochastic model for the cosmological constant is presented, which yields a natural explanation for the smallness or zero value of the constant in the…
We consider the question of asymptotic observables in cosmology. We assume that string theory contains a landscape of vacua, and that metastable de Sitter regions can decay to zero cosmological constant by bubble nucleation. The asymptotic…
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
Starting from an (unknown) quantum gravitational model, one can invoke a sequence of approximations to progressively arrive at quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, QFT in flat spacetime, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and…
KKLT give a mechanism to generate de Sitter vacua in string theory. And recently, the scenario, {\em landscape}, is suggested to explain the problem of the cosmological constant. In this scenario, the cosmological constant is a de Sitter…
The recent progress in the understanding of the landscape of string theory vacua hints that the hierarchy problem might be the problem of a super-selection rule. The attractor mechanism gives a possibility to explain the choice of a vacuum.…
We demonstrate a first-principle analysis of the string theory landscapes in the framework of non-critical string/matrix models. In particular, we discuss non-perturbative instability, decay rate and the true vacuum of perturbative string…
In this scenario, a generic meta-stable deSitter vacuum site in the cosmic landscape in string theory has a very short lifetime. Typically, the smaller is the vacuum energy of a meta-stable site, the longer is its lifetime. This view of the…
At very early times, the universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the assumtion that the deviation from equillibrium was large, in particular that it is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyse the conditions for local transitions…
In a universe whose elementary constituents are point particles there does not seem to be any obvious mechanism for avoiding the initial singularities in physical quantities in the standard model of cosmology. In contrast in string theory…
The possibility of the cosmic string creation by the vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields in the self-consistent semiclassical theory of gravity is discussed. We use the approximate method for obtaining vacuum expectation value of the…