2003/10/21 by John F. Donoghue
Physics and Astronomy · #Attractor #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Brane #Cosmological constant #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #False vacuum #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Hierarchy problem #Inflation (cosmology) #Intersection (aeronautics) #Invariant (physics) #Mathematical physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scale invariance #Spectrum (functional analysis) #Supersymmetry #Theoretical physics #Universe #Vacuum energy #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.69.106012
published as Phys.Rev.D69:106012,2004; Erratum-ibid.D69:129901,2004 · 30 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2003/10/21 · openalex publication_date 2004/05/28 · arxiv updated 2014/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
At very early times, the Universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the assumption that the deviation from equilibrium was large, in particular, that it is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyze the conditions for local transitions between states that are related to different vacua. All pathways lead to an attractor solution of a description of the Universe by eternal inflation with domains that have different low energy parameters. The generic case favors transitions between states that have significantly different parameters rather than jumps between nearby states in parameter space. I argue that the strong CP problem presents a potential difficulty for this picture, more difficult than the hierarchy problem or the cosmological constant problem. Finally, I describe how the spectrum of quark masses may be a probe of the early dynamics of vacuum states. As an example, by specializing to the case of intersecting braneworld models, I show that the observed mass spectrum, which is approximately scale invariant, corresponds to a flat distribution in the intersection area of the branes, with a maximum area Amax\ensuremath∼100\ensuremathα^\ensuremath'.