A volume-weighted measure for eternal inflation

Abstract

I propose a new volume-weighted probability measure for cosmological "multiverse" scenarios involving eternal inflation. The "reheating-volume (RV) cutoff" calculates the distribution of observable quantities on a portion of the reheating hypersurface that is conditioned to be finite. The RV measure is gauge-invariant, does not suffer from the "youngness paradox," and is independent of initial conditions at the beginning of inflation. In slow-roll inflationary models with a scalar inflaton, the RV-regulated probability distributions can be obtained by solving nonlinear diffusion equations. I discuss possible applications of the new measure to "landscape" scenarios with bubble nucleation. As an illustration, I compute the predictions of the RV measure in a simple toy landscape.

Version accepted for publication in Phys.Rev

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