Spontaneous Creation of Inflationary Universes and the Cosmic Landscape

Abstract

We study some gravitational instanton solutions that offer a natural realization of the spontaneous creation of inflationary universes in the brane world context in string theory. Decoherence due to couplings of higher (perturbative) modes of the metric as well as matter fields modifies the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction for de Sitter space. Generalizing this new wavefunction to be used in string theory, we propose a principle in string theory that hopefully will lead us to the particular vacuum we live in, thus avoiding the anthropic principle. As an illustration of this idea, we give a phenomenological analysis of the probability of quantum tunneling to various stringy vacua. We find that the preferred tunneling is to an inflationary universe (like our early universe), not to a universe with a very small cosmological constant (i.e., like today's universe) and not to a 10-dimensional uncompactified de Sitter universe. Such preferred solutions are interesting as they offer a cosmological mechanism for the stabilization of extra dimensions during the inflationary epoch.

arXiv comment52 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Added discussion on supercritical string vacua, added references

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Cited by in corpus (40)

• Flux Compactification
• Dark Energy
• Type IIA Moduli Stabilization
• Hartle-Hawking Wave-Function for Flux Compactifications
• Statistics on the Heterotic Landscape: Gauge Groups and Cosmological Constants of Four-Dimensional Heterotic Strings
• A New Handle on de Sitter Compactifications
• Cosmological Landscape From Nothing: Some Like It Hot
• Density Perturbations and the Cosmological Constant from Inflationary Landscapes
• Thermodynamics via Creation from Nothing: Limiting the Cosmological Constant Landscape
• The cosmology in f(R,T) gravity without dark energy
• Why there is something rather than nothing (out of everything)?
• Is Brane Inflation Eternal?
• Susskind's Challenge to the Hartle-Hawking No-Boundary Proposal and Possible Resolutions
• The Landscape of String Theory and The Wave Function of the Universe
• Wiggles in the cosmic microwave background radiation: echoes from non-singular cyclic-inflation
• A Calculable Toy Model of the Landscape
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• Quantisation of Parameters and the String Landscape Problem
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• The Most Probable Size of the Universe
• A Fly in the SOUP
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• Instanton transition in thermal and moduli deformed de Sitter cosmology
• Observational Consequences of Quantum Cosmology
• The Geometry of The Entropic Principle and the Shape of the Universe
• Self-similar cosmologies in 5D: Our universe as a topological separation from an empty 5D Minkowski space
• The universe formation by a space reduction cascade with random initial parameters
• Accelerating universe emergent from the landscape
• Unitarity at Infinity and Topological Holography
• Gravity with Higher Derivatives in D-Dimensions
• Exact spectrum of scalar field perturbations in a radiation deformed closed de Sitter universe
• Quantum Cosmology Aspects Of D3 Branes and Tachyon Dynamics
• Evolution of sub-spaces at high and low energies
• Vacuum Selection on the String Landscape
• Sub-Planckian scale and limits for $f(R)$ models
• Quantum Creation of a Toy Universe without Inflation