Anthropic Distribution for Cosmological Constant and Primordial Density Perturbations

Abstract

The anthropic principle has been proposed as an explanation for the observed value of the cosmological constant. Here we revisit this proposal by allowing for variation between universes in the amplitude of the scale-invariant primordial cosmological density perturbations. We derive a priori probability distributions for this amplitude from toy inflationary models in which the parameter of the inflaton potential is smoothly distributed over possible universes. We find that for such probability distributions, the likelihood that we live in a typical, anthropically-allowed universe is generally quite small.

12 pages, 2 tables. v3: Replaced to match published version (minor corrections of form)

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