Inflation and eternal inflation

By A. Guth. 2000

281 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in terms of the way that predictions are extracted from theoretical models. The ambiguities in defining probabilities in eternally inflating spacetimes are reviewed, with emphasis on the youngness paradox that results from a synchronous gauge regularization technique. Vilenkin's proposal for avoiding these problems is also discussed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2962587c2c54e876d7905738b0e2ed7e3e20f5a5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. V. Hubeny
2. César Gómez
3. G. Dvali
4. S. Shenker
5. D. Stanford
6. S. Carroll
7. Jennifer Chen
8. L. Susskind

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. V. Hubeny
2. César Gómez
3. S. Shenker
4. D. Stanford
5. G. Dvali
6. L. Susskind
7. D. Harlow
8. S. Carroll

Citations in the corpus

• Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua (2008, background): “[123] for a brief review, and Stev e Shenker’s lectures at this school).”
• Spontaneous inflation and the origin of the arrow of time (2004, background): “In practice, using this volume factor to calculate sensible probabilities is extremely difficult at best [76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 23]; nevertheless, if our only purpose is to compare inflation to non-inflation, it seems legitimate to appeal to the fecundity of eternal inflation in creating livab”
• Quantum compositeness of gravity: black holes, AdS and inflation (2013, background): “Again it excludes the possibility of eternal inflation [52–57] or any scalar potential classically permitting a constant plateau region.”
• The black hole singularity in AdS/CFT (2003, background): “A complete description of eternal inflation [17] probably requires an understanding of the many “universes” behind the de Sitter horizon of a single inflating patch [18,19,20].”