Islands in the landscape

2007/01/10 by Timothy Clifton, T. Clifton, Andrei Linde +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Quantum many-body systems #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2007/02/024

published as JHEP 0702:024,2007 · 31 pages, 8 figures

arxiv created 2007/01/10 · openalex publication_date 2007/02/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

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.

Citations

• de Sitter vacua in string theory
• Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant

Cited by

• Building a nest at tree level: Classical metastability and nontrivial vacuum structure in supersymmetric field theories
• Deforming, revolving and resolving—new paths in the string theory landscape