Volume weighting the measure of the universe from classical slow-roll expansion

David Sloan and Joseph Silk
Phys. Rev. D 93, 104030 – Published 16 May 2016

Abstract

One of the most frustrating issues in early universe cosmology centers on how to reconcile the vast choice of universes in string theory and in its most plausible high energy sibling, eternal inflation, which jointly generate the string landscape with the fine-tuned and hence relatively small number of universes that have undergone a large expansion and can accommodate observers and, in particular, galaxies. We show that such observations are highly favored for any system whereby physical parameters are distributed at a high energy scale, due to the conservation of the Liouville measure and the gauge nature of volume, asymptotically approaching a period of large isotropic expansion characterized by w=1. Our interpretation predicts that all observational probes for deviations from w=1 in the foreseeable future are doomed to failure. The purpose of this paper is not to introduce a new measure for the multiverse, but rather to show how what is perhaps the most natural and well-known measure, volume weighting, arises as a consequence of the conservation of the Liouville measure on phase space during the classical slow-roll expansion.

  • Received 11 May 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.104030

© 2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

David Sloan1,* and Joseph Silk1,2,3,4,†

  • 1Beecroft Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, 1 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, United Kingdom
  • 2Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, UMR 7095, CNRS, UPMC Université Paris 6, Sorbonne Universités, 98 bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France
  • 3Laboratoire AIM-Paris-Saclay, CEA/DSM/IRFU, CNRS, Universite Paris Diderot, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA

  • *david.sloan@physics.ox.ac.uk
  • silk@iap.fr

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Issue

Vol. 93, Iss. 10 — 15 May 2016

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