Inflation Expels Runaways

Abstract

We argue that moduli stabilization generically restricts the evolution following transitions between weakly coupled de Sitter vacua and can induce a strong selection bias towards inflationary cosmologies. The energy density of domain walls between vacua typically destabilizes Kahler moduli and triggers a runaway towards large volume. This decompactification phase can collapse the new de Sitter region unless a minimum amount of inflation occurs after the transition. A stable vacuum transition is guaranteed only if the inflationary expansion generates overlapping past light cones for all observable modes originating from the reheating surface, which leads to an approximately flat and isotropic universe. High scale inflation is vastly favored. Our results point towards a framework for studying parameter fine-tuning and inflationary initial conditions in flux compactifications.

56 pages, 17 figures; v2: fixed typos

References in corpus (19)

• Flux Compactification
• The String Landscape and the Swampland
• Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua
• Euclidean Wormholes in String Theory
• Computational complexity of the landscape I
• Predicting the Cosmological Constant from the Causal Entropic Principle
• Inflation and String Theory
• On the Possibility of Large Axion Moduli Spaces
• Predicting the cosmological constant with the scale-factor cutoff measure
• Heretics of the False Vacuum: Gravitational Effects On and Of Vacuum Decay 2
• Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don't Count String Models
• Landscape Predictions from Cosmological Vacuum Selection
• Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
• Volume Weighted Measures of Eternal Inflation in the Bousso-Polchinski Landscape
• The Top 10^{500} Reasons Not to Believe in the Landscape
• Entropy and initial conditions in cosmology
• An obstacle to populating the string theory landscape
• Horizons and Tunneling in the Euclidean False Vacuum
• Tunnelling with wormhole creation