Regulating Eternal Inflation II: The Great Divide

Abstract

In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a "regulated" picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum energy, as the positive vacuum energy was sent to zero; analytic and numerical arguments supporting this conjecture were given. Here we show that this conjecture is false, but in an interesting way. There are no cases where tunneling amplitudes are discontinuous at vanishing cosmological constant; rather, the space of potentials separates into two regions. In one region decay is strongly suppressed, and the proposed picture of eternal inflation remains viable; sending the (false) vacuum energy to zero in this region results in an absolutely stable asymptotically flat space. In the other region, we argue that the space-time at vanishing cosmological constant is unstable, but not asymptotically Minkowski. The consequences of our results for theories of supersymmetry breaking are unchanged.

JHEP3, 19 Pages, 7 Figures

References in corpus (11)

• Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant
• Static Domain Walls in N=1 Supergravity
• Can the universe afford inflation?
• Inflation in AdS/CFT
• Prospects of Inflation
• Remarks on Tachyon Driven Cosmology
• Holographic Cosmology 3.0
• Local and global gravitational aspects of domain wall space-times
• Oscillating bounce solutions and vacuum tunneling in de Sitter spacetime
• Two Tunnels to Inflation
• Non-Extreme and Ultra-Extreme Domain Walls and Their Global Space-Times

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Hurdles for Recent Measures in Eternal Inflation
• Determining the outcome of cosmic bubble collisions in full General Relativity
• Evidence for a bound on the lifetime of de Sitter space
• Impact of Gravity on Vacuum Stability
• Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
• Eternal Inflation With Non-Inflationary Pocket Universes
• Instanton solutions mediating tunneling between the degenerate vacua in curved space
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• Oscillating instanton solutions in curved space
• Tunneling from a Minkowski vacuum to an AdS vacuum: A new thin-wall regime
• Negative modes of Coleman-de Luccia and black hole bubbles
• The Case of the Disappearing Instanton
• Revisiting Coleman-de Luccia transitions in the AdS regime using holography
• Supersymmetry Breaking and the Cosmological Constant
• Holographic Space-time from the Big Bang to the de Sitter era
• Decay of False Vacuum via Fuzzy Monopole in String Theory
• Consistency of Scalar Potentials from Quantum de Sitter Space
• Reheating-volume measure in the landscape
• Tunneling Constraints on Effective Theories of Stable de Sitter Space
• A Pyramid Scheme for Particle Physics
• The Fate of Nearly Supersymmetric Vacua
• Vacuum Decay Actions from Tunneling Potentials for General Spacetime Dimension
• The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
• Generalized surface tension bounds in vacuum decay
• Embedding the Pentagon
• The nucleation of false vacuum bubbles with compact geometries
• Cosmological SUSY Breaking and the Pyramid Schemes
• JT de Sitter Gravity as a Model of Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling
• Comment on Coleman-DeLuccia Instantons
• Instanton interaction in de Sitter spacetime