Thermal transitions in the Landscape

por Matthew Kleban (New York University)

miércoles 28 feb. 2007 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios (Dpto. de Física Teórica (UVEG))

I will describe the structure and cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to the decay rate is the Hawking-Moss instanton. I will interpret this solution and describe the resulting cosmology, and argue that an observation of significant positive curvature would rule out the possibility that our universe arose from any transition from a neighboring minimum in the string-theory landscape.