Probabilities in the landscape: The decay of nearly flat space

Abstract

We discuss aspects of the problem of assigning probabilities in eternal inflation. In particular, we investigate a recent suggestion that the lowest energy de Sitter vacuum in the landscape is effectively stable. The associated proposal for probabilities would relegate lower energy vacua to unlikely excursions of a high entropy system. We note that it would also imply that the string theory landscape is experimentally ruled out. However, we extensively analyze the structure of the space of Coleman-De Luccia solutions, and we present analytic arguments, as well as numerical evidence, that the decay rate varies continuously as the false vacuum energy goes through zero. Hence, low-energy de Sitter vacua do not become anomalously stable; negative and zero cosmological constant regions cannot be neglected.

18 pages, 13 figures, Mathematica notebooks available from the authors. v2,v3: typos and omissions fixed

References in corpus (5)

• The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
• de Sitter Space in Non-Critical String Theory
• A Moduli Fixing Mechanism in M theory
• Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don't Count String Models
• Probabilities in the landscape

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Eternal inflation and its implications
• Sinks in the Landscape, Boltzmann Brains, and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation
• Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
• Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
• Eternal observers and bubble abundances in the landscape
• The Born Rule Dies
• Cosmological Measures without Volume Weighting
• Evidence for a bound on the lifetime of de Sitter space
• Fluctuations about Cosmological Instantons
• An obstacle to populating the string theory landscape
• The Fate of Nearly Supersymmetric Vacua