Probabilities in the inflationary multiverse
By J. Garriga, Delia Schwartz-Perlov, A. Vilenkin, S. Winitzki. 2005
189 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 landscape of string theory, the effective constants of Nature are randomized by quantum processes during inflation. We discuss an analytic estimate for the volume distribution of the constants within each pocket universe. This estimate is based on the conjecture that the field distribution is approximately ergodic in the diffusion regime, when the dynamics of the fields is dominated by quantum fluctuations (rather than by the classical drift). We then propose a method for determining the relative abundances of different kinds of pocket universes. Both ingredients are combined into an expression for the distribution of the constants in pocket universes of all types.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Economics and Econometrics, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b223410c5a2afe9a3bde8f3437a78d3556d91f8b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Andrei Linde
- Ben Freivogel
- A. Guth
- Mahdiyar Noorbala
- A. Vilenkin
- Andrea De Simone
- Stefan Nobbenhuis
- Michael P. Salem
In Economics and Econometrics
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Sinks in the landscape, Boltzmann brains and the cosmological constant problem (2006, methodology): “Fortunately, the corresponding procedure is quite straightforward if one uses the method of integration of these equations along the lines of [18, 17].”
- Making predictions in the multiverse (2011, methodology): “This time variable was first defined by Garriga et al [17] in the more restricted context of counting the number of bubbles of each type.”
- Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem (2004, methodology): “In a recent paper a different method is proposed to find this distribution [254].”
- Boltzmann brains and the scale-factor cutoff measure of the multiverse (2008, background): “[21] that sj ≤ 0 for terminal vacua, and sj > 0 for nonterminal vacua, as is needed for Eq.”