English

Probabilities in the Bousso-Polchinski multiverse

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-11-11 v2 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Using the recently introduced method to calculate bubble abundances in an eternally inflating spacetime, we investigate the volume distribution for the cosmological constant Λ\Lambda in the context of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape model. We find that the resulting distribution has a staggered appearance which is in sharp contrast to the heuristically expected flat distribution. Previous successful predictions for the observed value of Λ\Lambda have hinged on the assumption of a flat volume distribution. To reconcile our staggered distribution with observations for Λ\Lambda, the BP model would have to produce a huge number of vacua in the anthropic range ΔΛA\Delta\Lambda_A of Λ\Lambda, so that the distribution could conceivably become smooth after averaging over some suitable scale δΛΔΛA\delta\Lambda\ll\Delta\Lambda_A.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0601162,
  title  = {Probabilities in the Bousso-Polchinski multiverse},
  author = {Delia Schwartz-Perlov and Alexander Vilenkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0601162},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

21 pages, 7 figures Minor changes made

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:34:27.064Z