Related papers: Vacuum Selection on the String Landscape
I conjecture that a flat 10D compact universe emerged out of nothing (By ``nothing'' I mean no notion of space and time) with all it's symmetries intact: Poincare invariance, conformal invariance and supersymmetry, it's massless moduli…
Inflationary cosmology leads to the picture of a "multiverse," involving an infinite number of (spatially infinite) post-inflationary thermalized regions, called pocket universes. In the context of theories with many vacua, such as the…
The definition of thermodynamic entropy is dependent on one's assignment of physical microstates to observed macrostates. As a result, low entropy in the distant past could be equivalently explained by selection of a particular observer. In…
We study string interaction rates in the Brandenberger-Vafa scenario, the very early universe cosmology of a gas of strings. This cosmology starts with the assumption that all spatial dimensions are compact and initially have string scale…
We study some gravitational instanton solutions that offer a natural realization of the spontaneous creation of inflationary universes in the brane world context in string theory. Decoherence due to couplings of higher (perturbative) modes…
Recent advances in string theory and inflationary cosmology have led to a surge of interest in the possible existence of an ensemble of cosmic regions, or universes, among the members of which key physical parameters, such as the masses of…
``Constants of Nature'' and cosmological parameters may in fact be variables related to some slowly-varying fields. In models of eternal inflation, such fields will take different values in different parts of the universe. Here I show how…
Vacuum structure and global cosmic strings are analyzed in the effective theory of self-interacting O(2) scalar fields on (3+1)-manifolds with conical singularities. In the context of one-loop effective action computed by heat-kernel…
We compute the distribution of minima that are reached dynamically on multi-field axionic landscapes, both numerically and analytically. Such landscapes are well suited for inflationary model building due to the presence of shift symmetries…
We examine variations in the equation of state of the cosmic string portion of the cosmological fluid which lead to perturbations of the background matter density. These fluctuations in the equation of state are due to variations in the…
In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
The String Landscape is a fantasy. We actually have a plausible landscape of minimally supersymmetric $AdS_4$ solutions of supergravity modified by an exponential superpotential. None of these solutions is accessible to world sheet…
The interplay between string theory and early-universe cosmology offers promising avenues to explore high-energy regimes where the standard single-field slow-roll model may no longer provide an accurate description. One intriguing scenario…
We show that anthropic selection emerges inevitably in the general framework for prediction in quantum cosmology. There the predictions of anthropic reasoning depend on the prior implied by the universe's quantum state. To illustrate this…
The creation of a quantum Universe is described by a {\em density matrix} which yields an ensemble of universes with the cosmological constant limited to a bounded range $\Lambda_{\rm min}\leq \Lambda \leq \Lambda_{\rm max}$. The domain…
String geometry theory is a candidate of the non-perturvative formulation of string theory. In this theory, strings constitute not only particles but also the space-time. In this review, we identify perturbative vacua, and derive the…
The string theory landscape consists of many metastable de Sitter vacua, populated by eternal inflation. Tunneling between these vacua gives rise to a dynamical system, which asymptotically settles down to an equilibrium state. We…
It seems likely that string theory has a landscape of vacua that includes very many metastable de Sitter spaces. However, as emphasized by Banks, Dine and Gorbatov, no current framework exists for examining these metastable vacua in string…
The cosmological constant and the Higgs mass seem unnaturally small and anthropically selected. We show that both can be efficiently scanned in Quantum Field Theories with a large enough number of vacua controllable thanks to approximated…