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Regulating Eternal Inflation II: The Great Divide

Anthony Aguirre1, Tom Banks2,3 and Matthew Johnson4

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In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a "regulated" picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum energy, as the positive vacuum energy was sent to zero; analytic and numerical arguments supporting this conjecture were given. Here we show that this conjecture is false, but in an interesting way. There are no cases where tunneling amplitudes are discontinuous at vanishing cosmological constant; rather, the space of potentials separates into two regions. In one region decay is strongly suppressed, and the proposed picture of eternal inflation remains viable; sending the (false) vacuum energy to zero in this region results in an absolutely stable asymptotically flat space. In the other region, we argue that the space-time at vanishing cosmological constant is unstable, but not asymptotically Minkowski. The consequences of our results for theories of supersymmetry breaking are unchanged.

Keywords

Solitons Monopoles and Instantons

dS vacua in string theory

PACS

98.80.Cq Particle-theory and field-theory models of the early Universe (including cosmic pancakes, cosmic strings, chaotic phenomena, inflationary universe, etc.)

98.80.Es Observational cosmology (including Hubble constant, distance scale, cosmological constant, early Universe, etc)

11.30.Qc Spontaneous and radiative symmetry breaking

Subjects

Gravitation and cosmology

Particle physics and field theory

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 08 (August 2006)

Received 21 April 2006, accepted for publication 19 July 2006

Published 25 August 2006



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