Escaping the crunch: Gravitational effects in classical transitions
- California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)
- ISCAP and Physics Department, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027 (United States)
During eternal inflation, a landscape of vacua can be populated by the nucleation of bubbles. These bubbles inevitably collide, and collisions sometimes displace the field into a new minimum in a process known as a classical transition. In this paper, we examine some new features of classical transitions that arise when gravitational effects are included. Using the junction condition formalism, we study the conditions for energy conservation in detail, and solve explicitly for the types of allowed classical transition geometries. We show that the repulsive nature of domain walls, and the de Sitter expansion associated with a positive energy minimum, can allow for classical transitions to vacua of higher energy than that of the colliding bubbles. Transitions can be made out of negative or zero energy (terminal) vacua to a de Sitter phase, restarting eternal inflation, and populating new vacua. However, the classical transition cannot produce vacua with energy higher than the original parent vacuum, which agrees with previous results on the construction of pockets of false vacuum. We briefly comment on the possible implications of these results for various measure proposals in eternal inflation.
- OSTI ID:
- 21421205
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 82, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.82.065023; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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