Volume Weighted Measures of Eternal Inflation in the Bousso-Polchinski Landscape

Abstract

We consider the cosmological dynamics associated with volume weighted measures of eternal inflation, in the Bousso-Polchinski model of the string theory landscape. We find that this measure predicts that observers are most likely to find themselves in low energy vacua with one flux considerably larger than the rest. Furthermore, it allows for a satisfactory anthropic explanation of the cosmological constant problem by producing a smooth, and approximately constant, distribution of potentially observable values of Lambda. The low energy vacua selected by this measure are often short lived. If we require anthropically acceptable vacua to have a minimum life-time of 10 billion years, then for reasonable parameters a typical observer should expect their vacuum to have a life-time of approximately 12 billion years. This prediction is model dependent, but may point toward a solution to the coincidence problem of cosmology.

35 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Flux Compactification
• Sinks in the Landscape, Boltzmann Brains, and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation
• Landscape Predictions from Cosmological Vacuum Selection
• Islands in the landscape

Cited by in corpus (13)

• TASI Lectures on the Cosmological Constant
• Predicting the cosmological constant with the scale-factor cutoff measure
• Boltzmann babies in the proper time measure
• Prediction and explanation in the multiverse
• Stationary Measure in the Multiverse
• The Born Rule Dies
• Cosmological Measures without Volume Weighting
• Predictions of the causal entropic principle for environmental conditions of the universe
• Inflation Expels Runaways
• Reheating-volume measure for random-walk inflation
• Reheating-volume measure in the landscape
• Agnesi Weighting for the Measure Problem of Cosmology
• Black holes and up-tunneling suppress Boltzmann brains