Tufts/CfA/MIT Cosmology Seminar, at MIT:

Tuesday, May 9, 2006
2:30 pm
Center for Theoretical Physics Seminar Room
Building NE25, Fourth Floor
Refreshments at 2:00, same location

"Probabilities in the Multiverse"


Delia Schwartz-Perlov
Tufts

Abstract:

Inflationary cosmology leads to the picture of a ``multiverse," involving an infinite number of post-inflationary thermalized regions, called pocket universes. In the context of theories with many vacua, such as the landscape of string theory, the effective constants of Nature may take on different values in different vacua. We propose a method for determining the relative abundances of different types of pocket universes. Using this prescription, we investigate the volume distribution for the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ in the context of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape model. We find that the resulting distribution has a staggered appearance which is in sharp contrast to the heuristically expected flat distribution.

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