2024/07/11 by Alek Bedroya, Bedroya, Alek, Qianshu Lu +3 · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Multidisciplinary Warburg-centric Studies #Art, Technology, and Culture #Art, Politics, and Modernism
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.08793
We consider the classical Friedmann-Robertson-Walker solutions that describe a universe undergoing a transition from an accelerating expansion phase in the past to an eternal decelerating expansion phase in the future, driven by a scalar field evolving in a potential energy landscape. We show that any solution for which the accelerating phase violates the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC), even in the interior of moduli space, never approaches the asymptotic vacuum with zero particles. Based on the assumption that the effective field theory must be valid for the vacuum on the asymptotic boundary, as motivated by holography and string theory, we argue that (multi-field) scalar potentials with such solutions are disallowed, thus strengthening the case for TCC. In particular, the results imply a new set of complex and highly-nonlinear constraints across the entire string landscape which may make realizing inflation impossible.