Islands in the landscape

Abstract

The string theory landscape consists of many metastable de Sitter vacua, populated by eternal inflation. Tunneling between these vacua gives rise to a dynamical system, which asymptotically settles down to an equilibrium state. We investigate the effects of sinks to anti-de Sitter space, and show how their existence can change probabilities in the landscape. Sinks can disturb the thermal occupation numbers that would otherwise exist in the landscape and may cause regions that were previously in thermal contact to be divided into separate, thermally isolated islands.

31 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Sinks in the Landscape, Boltzmann Brains, and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Geodesic measures of the landscape

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Inflationary Cosmology
• Graceful exit from a stringy landscape via MSSM inflation
• Volume Weighted Measures of Eternal Inflation in the Bousso-Polchinski Landscape
• Dynamics of false vacuum bubbles with nonminimal coupling
• Building a Nest at Tree Level: Classical Metastability and Non-Trivial Vacuum Structure in Supersymmetric Field Theories
• Deforming, revolving and resolving - New paths in the string theory landscape
• Eternal inflation and localization on the landscape