skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Reheating-volume measure in the string theory landscape

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
 [1]
  1. Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich (Germany)

I recently proposed the ''reheating-volume'' (RV) prescription as a possible solution to the measure problem in ''multiverse'' cosmology. The goal of this work is to extend the RV measure to scenarios involving bubble nucleation, such as the string theory landscape. In the spirit of the RV prescription, I propose to calculate the distribution of observable quantities in a landscape that is conditioned in probability to nucleate a finite total number of bubbles to the future of an initial bubble. A general formula for the relative number of bubbles of different types can be derived. I show that the RV measure is well defined and independent of the choice of the initial bubble type, as long as that type supports further bubble nucleation. Applying the RV measure to a generic landscape, I find that the abundance of Boltzmann brains is always negligibly small compared with the abundance of ordinary observers in the bubbles of the same type. As an illustration, I present explicit results for a toy landscape containing four vacuum states, and for landscapes with a single high-energy vacuum and a large number of low-energy vacua.

OSTI ID:
21251107
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 78, Issue 12; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.78.123518; (c) 2008 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Volume-weighted measure for eternal inflation
Journal Article · Fri Aug 15 00:00:00 EDT 2008 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields · OSTI ID:21251107

Watchers of the multiverse
Journal Article · Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics · OSTI ID:21251107

Reheating-volume measure for random-walk inflation
Journal Article · Mon Sep 15 00:00:00 EDT 2008 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields · OSTI ID:21251107